User friendly view rotation & zoom

[tincansassoc]

I have a suggestion to improve the view rotation and zoom in PhotoScan, since I find it to be a little clumsy compared to other software I have used.

The default view rotation in Photoscan appears to rotate around the center of the model, which is great unless you are zoomed in on a specific area and want to rotate around it. This is where Photoscan gets clumsy.

My favorite style of view rotation is in a mechanical modeling software I use called Solidworks. Solidworks will similarly rotate the view around the center of the object, but it also has an additional way to rotate the view using the cursor depending on if the cursor is hovered over the model or over free space. If the cursor is hovered over free space, then the view will rotate around the center of the object, but if the cursor is hovered over the model, then the software will rotate around the "selected" surface the cursor was hoovered over. This allows you rotate around a specific area while zoomed in. This eliminates the need to be constantly panning around to get to what you wanted to look at and is much more user friendly.

Another feature Solidworks utilizes is when zooming with the mouse wheel. The viewport will zoom towards when the cursor is located on the screen. This can be useful because it also eliminates the need for panning completely if you just move the wheel in and out towards the selected area you want to look at.

I am not suggesting you eliminate the pan feature, it is a good tool, however these additional techniques seem to be a lot faster than the way Photoscan currently works.

I found an older youtube video that describes what I am talking about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ_uNS9zgwQ

[RalfH]

Good idea. Rotating when zoomed in is indeed not much fun in PhotoScan.

[tincansassoc]

Another view tool that is very helpful is a "Previous View" tool that will backup a couple of views in case you accidentally found yourself looking at some part of the model you didn't want to. Which I have found happens a lot.

[tincansassoc]

two more suggestions to improve view rotation

1. Allow Each chunk to "remember" where you had the view angle set, this will eliminate unnecessary view rotating while analyzing & comparing your different chunks.

2. Add a feature to set your default view orientation to a desired location. This could be determined by the bounding box (one side of the box could be outlined a different color and considered the "front view") or just a button that sets the view relative to an orgin. The would allow the possibility of jumping the view to Front, Back, Left, Right, Top, Bottom views.