Softimage Blog

For better or worse, XSI has many menus and many user preferences. In XSI 5.0, we added this switch that allows setting the application to “Alt Key Navigation and QWERTY tools”. In other words, Maya-like mode. This global switch in fact toggles a bunch of existing options and picks the Qwerty keymap. If you”re interested in some of these, but not all, you can pick them individually. But first, let’’s look at a couple of things Max users don”t think XSI has.

Oribit Around Selection

Open the User Preferences page, in the menu File|User Preferences.
Click on the left to expand the ”Tools” group, and pick ”Camera”.

In there, you can turn on Orbit Around Selection, which will make the camera pivot around any selected object or component.

Personnally, I thought this was mostly useful in component mode, and less useful in Object mode, where it is sometime unpredictable if you”re zoomed in. So you have the non-standard choice of ”Orbit Around Component”, or as Brent would say, Luc-Eric-forced-me-to-put-this mode.

Camera Navigation On ALT without changing the XSI keymap

In that same property page, you can turn on ALT camera nagivation. You should also turn on the alternate mouse mapping to make it behave like Maya (where the mouse buttons are not in the same order)

Isolate Selection

We have Isolate Selection viewing mode, but we don”t have a keyboard shortcut for it. It’’s located in the Camera icon menu in each viewport. It’’s not global to all viewports. To turn it off, click the next menu item, ”Isolate All”. Yes, we”ll use a better label for that in the future.

Today a user has shown me he uses the Object View to replicate Isolate Selection mode. There is nothing wrong with this. We had Isolation Selection years before Object View. Update: I”m told we actually got Isolate Selection at the same time as Object ViewWe mostly intended object view to be used for custom animation views that focus on a character’’s face, for example, but using it for modeling is perfectly OK.

Click Outside Manipulator To Select Objects

Back in the User Preferences page, go to Tools -> Transform.

Here you can choose what happens when you click outside a manipulator, which includes ”Selection Tool”. Try it.

Yes, I know, XSI Blog readers would know this…

Some new users do not know about ‘’supra keys”, i.e. the concept in XSI whereby we can activate a tool temporarily by holding the key down, and performing the action before releasing the key.

For example, let’’s say you”re in the transform tool and need to pick a new object. Hold down spacebar (or Q in the Qwerty keymap), and select the new object. When you release the space bar, you”ll be back to whatever tool was activated before — in this case, the transform tool.

This is called the Supra Keys. If you hit a key for a tool, but don”t perform an action an action, for example you press and release Spacebar, the tool now ‘’sticks” and becomes the new active tool. We call this ”Sticky Keys”. You would have to press another key to get back to the Transform tool. (Qwerty keymap users can also press ”y” to re-activate the last tool).

I”m not aware of any other application that does this, it’’s an ingenious mix of Softimage|3D, which forced you to hold down keys to use a tool, and other applications where you press (and release) a key to active a tool.

Also, don”t forget you can middle-click the mouse on any menu button or sub-menu to recall the last command you picked in that menu. It’’s a quick way to toggle between shade and wireframe, for example, or repeat modeling commands. In V5.0, this now works for the top menus and any submenus, too.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2005 at 11:33 pm and is filed under User Interface. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.