[tuhopuu-devel] Camera fly-mode

[Ewout]

Hello
I'm new to this list, so I will give a short introduction of myself first.

I study Industrial Design Engineering at the Delft University of
Technology (the Netherlands). My main interest goes to information &
graphics design currently. I have worked with several 3D applications
before Blender: Maya (because we have that at our faculty), Cinema4D (I
only tried that for a short while, but that was before the n-gons
support), SolidWorks (a 3D CAD package) & VX (CAD/CAM suite).

In some aspects, blender differs a lot from most 3D programs I have seen
or even worked with. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes
I believe the non-standard approach should be avoided.

One of the things that I would like to change, is the way you position
the camera. This is the way I do it now: I move the viewport to a
convenient location, then press ctrl-alt-0 (which even appears to be
somewhat buggy!!!) to move the camera to that view. Usually that needs
some adjustment still, because I find it hard to predict how the camera
will clip the view (the render borders).
I find it quite difficult and non-intuitive to postion the camera using
GKEY, also because that only pans the view and doesn't allow you to
dolly in or rotate the view (only on the axis normal to the camera,
which I would rarely use).

My proposal is as follows:
When the user wants to position his camera, he presses 0KEY. That takes
him to the camera view like it would normally. Only, when this camera is
'activated', it switches to a kind of 'fly camera' mode, where you
navigate the camera the way you would navigate the viewport. pressing
0KEY again takes the user out of this mode, bringing it back to the way
it works now.

I can't think of other (more primary) functions for the camera view that
the user would (want to) have as a default mode. And I really believe
this would greatly enhance the ability to create a nice viewpoint for
the composition.

Do I miss something important? What do you think of this proposal?

Thanks,
Ewout