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[grahamguitarman]

Hi, I'm new to this forum, so if this is in the wrong place I apologise.  I've been using Animator on and off for a few years now, and I am currently using it to create the majority of the graphics for an RPG game I'm developing for the iPad.  Although Animator has an annoying tendency to crash a lot, it is still my favourite 3D program.

However there are a couple of shortcomings, that especially now I'm using it intensively (up to 12 hours a day six days a week at the moment) I'm beginning to find a pain.

The first one is the way objects are rotated in the Object view.  very often I'm having to switch to a side view to rotate a component, then switch back to front view to see if it is right, then switch back to side view to adjust it again because it isn't quite right, and so on.  I have always found it baffling that you have to switch to a side view of the object being rotated, when that makes it impossible to see what angle you have rotated to. 

What I think would be a much better system is the one now used for bones in the more recent versions.  The interface to rotate bones in three directions in the figure / animation editors is brilliant, and would make a much better way to rotate and align objects in the object modelling view (and would save me a lot of time and frustration).

The other feature that would make life a lot easier would be saved views.  one of the reasons I like animator is because of the perspective free orthographic view, which is great for producing figures and buildings in an RPG game.  Basically you don't want perspective in a top down tiled RPG.  Usually what I do is to select ortho view, then use the Arc rotate button to rotate the view so that it is square to the view finder (i.e. a cube will have its sides invisible due to being at right angles to the screen view if that makes sense).

All good and fine, but sometimes I forget to deactivate the arc button and then as soon as I try to do something the view rotates to a completely different angle.  Also because the point you have to place your mouse pointer on to rotate on one axis only is so small, sometimes I rotate in three axises by mistake.  And this is where the problems begin, because unlike all the other views, I cannot reset the Ortho view back to defaults if something goes wrong - I have to completely restart animator then go through the whole tricky business of getting the viewport exactly right again.

So it would be nice if we could have an option to save and recall viewport settings, i.e. angle of view, rotation etc.  That way when I go to render the latest buildings or characters, I can just click on my saved view button, and the viewport automatically sets up the view I need to maintain consistency in my game graphics.

[Hypure]

I recommend having the latest build 1205 if you don't already.  The ARC button now has a hot key that turns on and off as you hold alt. I personally prefer perspective view in my main window and make adjustments in windows 2, 3, and 4 windows (top, right. ortho, ect) that method may help your view point issues.   I use "grid snap" to help with object alignment when I need it and also pressing the arrow keys while left clicking a point makes fine exact adjustments.   There is also a script for determining precise distances between points.  Sometimes I would like to move something "in and out" without changing my view, in that case I briefly change to "object coordinates" rather than "screen coordinates" to do that.

[grahamguitarman]

I've just updated to 1205 a few days ago, but didn't know about the arc hot key, that is actually very useful. 

I'm not really a big fan of multiple views, but I can see how that might help with rotating objects and being able to see how much the object is being rotated - I'll have to give that a go. 

Though I still think an interface like the one used for bones would be a much more elegant solution. 

Object snapping I already know about, so is not really an issue for me. Though I rarely use it, as I prefer things slightly out of key sometimes - too much perfection can lose the character of old buildings.

I'd still like to see the ability to save view settings as a user preset you can recall when needed, as it would make setting up rotation and scaling much quicker.  I need to be able to render all my objects at exactly the same scale and rotation so when used in the game they all fit together properly, even though I'm using 3D rendering to create sprites, it is a 2D game, so getting the angle and scaling exactly the same every time is critical, and very time consuming to set up each time.