3D Connexion Users?

Rhino Rhino for Mac
1

Hi!

I’m looking for folks with experience with the 3D Connecxion mice, particularly on the OS X platform. My wife was kind enough to find me a used Space Pilot (the previous generation), which “sorta” works in that the cap part does it’s thing, and some (but not all) of the buttons work.

My understand after much googling is LogiTech has more or less intentionally removed the older products (the one I have) from the drivers as a means of attempting to get you to buy the new version (Space Pilot Pro).

What I’m curious about is whether or not you’ve got a current generation unit (SpaceMouse Pro or Space Pilot Pro) and what your opions are as to it’s a worthy upgrade, as these guys are pretty spendy.

My understanding is that the LCD screen is only partially implemented for OS X on the SpacePilot Pro.

In usage on the one I have, I can’t find a way to toggle between moving the viewport vs. moving a selected object or group within Rhino. They imply it can be done, but I can’t find a way to pull that off.

I also can’t for the life of me figure out a way to call up the radial menus, let alone configure them.

While the buttons for the view changes work in Blender just fine, I’m having a fairly difficult time locating a specific command to map to them in Rhino in order to change the view in single (non paned) mode. I’d love to be able to switch between Perspective / Top / Front in a single window.

For some reason, the 3DConnexion pref in Rhino is limited to 8 buttons, (which I don’t quite understand as the various units have 2, 12, and 31 buttons on them, none of which coincide to the 8 allowed by Rhino. Is there a particular reason for this?

This is one of those “can totally see the potential but have no idea how to realize it” types of things, which is a combination of my lack of experience with the product line itself and an unclear understanding of how it actually interfaces with Rhino.

Even though the drivers don’t completely mesh with the older SpacePilot I have, it’s pretty slick in Blender, but almost limited to manipulating the view only within Rhino, so I’m curious as to what other folks experiences have been.

TIA

Mark

2

i know it doesnt help too much but i have a space navigator and it works fine on both mac and windows version. its about a year old. not sure about the higher end units.

3

I use the new SpacePilot Pro. I am lucky in that a friend loaned it me, at first I thought it was a bit fancy and not much use other than a viewing tool. Once past the learning curve and having programmed macro’s and assigned the buttons, I’m not sure how I will work without it. I really do save hours using it on Rhino jobs.

The LCD screen is a handy reminder for what functions you have programmed, it scrolls sideways to display multiple screens and can also be turned on/off if you find it distracting. The really cool part is it recognises what software you are running and configures itself to that. If you switch to Google earth or Safari, it automatically switches to that app with relevant macros and button assignments. Once mastered its very quick to program from within the supplied utility and configurations saved. You can keep tweaking and saving till your happy with it.

A very powerful tool, but not implemented in lots of applications yet, i.e 3D printing, but then its not a tool your average Open Source developer is likely to have. I hate to admit but when this is returned I shall buy my own for OSX Rhino, it’s been a real eye opener for me.

Oh, your right about switching between views. I have a messy work around until it can be done as you suggest, but all done using Spacepilot Pro and mouse. I hope to see more support in future versions of OSX Rhino, especially as more people start using these devices.

4

Use Rhino for Mac with SpaceNavigator 3D Connexion combined with a Wacom tablet. I am very satisfied with the mouse 3d. It is strictly personal use and button settings. Using both the keyboard shortcuts, if I used the SpacePilot Pro should definitely get used to.

5

On the Rhino for Mac home page, under System Requirements, we state that the 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator is supported. We do not officially support any other 3DConnexion devices, although some users have reported that other 3DConnexion devices may partially work. We added the support for the SpaceNavigator years ago, when CAD software companies would provide the 3DConnexion device interface.

Since then, 3DConnexion has decided that they will write the device interface for all applications that support 3DConnexion devices. Since there is no publicly available SDK for Rhino for Mac, 3DConnexion is not able to write the device interface for Rhino for Mac for any of their devices that are newer than the SpaceNavigator.

6

Ok, I get that. Any particular reason you’ve arbitrarily chosen a max of 8 buttons to map to it?

The Space Navigator Pro supports 31, the Space Pilot Pro supports like 20 something.

If it were opened up to more buttons (as the 3DConnexion Pref pane in Rhino DOES report the buttons when pressed) we could customize it quite a bit more and leverage more of what the device is capable of.

Further, the 3DOF part works fine. It’d be nice if we could map a button to toggle between applying those transforms to a selected object or group OR the view. It doesn’t look like it’d take much besides allowing more buttons to be input to really open up the other models that have more than just the knob.
Granted the toggle between object and view movement would probably take a bit more work, but the button aspect looks pretty straight forward.

7

Came to use my SpacePilot Pro this morning and suffering horrendous drift in zoom. Its like the dead band at rest has gone. Updated WIP to RC4 and fault persists, I have run the calibration and tests supplied from 3D Connexion and its all working.

8

Problem sorted itself out when the RC4 update took hold !!! Seeing much strangeness during the three reboots trying to get my system stable again with Rhino.

9

Well I just got a SpacePIlot Pro. Starting futz with it, and having some flakiness in the macro’s coming through that I set up in it’s prefs.

Apparently in order to get Rhino to “read” the incoming stuff off the buttons I have to have at least ONE of the buttons mapped to a command in Rhino’s prefs.

Will investigate further, but at least it appears as though I may be able to get past the 8 function limit within Rhino’s prefs by mapping keystrokes or macros to the buttons.

Does anyone know if there are discrete commands I can use to navigate views? I’d like to map the Front / Back / Top / Bottom / Left / Right / Perspective stuff. When I dug into the online help for that it’s once again the Windows Help (apparently there’s still more windows stuff in the mac command help), and showed a windows looking tool palette I’ve never seen before.

FWIW, Blender sees it just fine, and I was easily able to map all the views in a couple minutes.

10

Ok, got it working. A bit clunky in what I had to do to get the view buttons to work, but it is working, and furthermore I can use the driver pref pane to map all the buttons.

When I get some time I’ll screen cap it and write up a little tutorial on how to do it.

Mark

1 Like
11

Cool. Very much looking forward to this.

Dave

12

MI would like to take this model of 3D mouse for use with Rhino mac. Can you give me some more information on the buttons? esc keys, shift, ctrl, alt operating properly? You can configure the control key as cmd? Other keys can be configured? Thank you.

Simon.

13

Simon,

Firstly apologies for not responding to you request a week or so back on the other thread, life got a little more hectic than usual. I’ve got a SpaceMouse Pro Wireless on a MacPro which I’ve been using quite a bit and the smaller SpaceMouse which I’ve used a moderate amount on my MacBook Pro. I’m actually planning on spending some time with both devices this week and sorting out a couple small issues but by and large the units work pretty well.

The esc, shift, ctrl, and alt buttons work fine. Mapping ctrl to cmd is easily accomplished in the 3DConnexion plugin in System Preferences. Its also fairly simple to map single commands to other buttons on the device from System Preferences. Couple nuances.

  1. I believe you have to map at least one button from the preferences pane in Rhino itself and I believe it has to be button #1 or #2, this is either “Menu” or “Fit” on the SpaceMouse Pro.

  2. Executing “complex” commands like orienting a view and switching to an orthagonal construction plane in one shot is a little kludgy in that you have to create a custom command button in Rhino and then execute that command out in System Preferences. I think some other posters have alluded to being able to do this with macros as well.

  3. I haven’t totally figured out 3DConnexion radial buttons where hitting one of the number keys pulls a pad of 4 commands or a number pad up on the screen under the mouse but that appears to work as well.

  4. There does appear to be some kind of bug where sometimes zooming in will make pan and rotation very slow. Rebooting seems to resolve the issue and I haven’t troubleshot it further than that.

Hope this helps a bit and I’ll post some more later in the week after I mess with things further.

Dave

14

Thank you very much for the information. If the bug that signals when zooming does not affect the job I’d take this mouse.

Simon.

15

Simon,

Don’t worry about the zooming bug. Its intermittent, easy to clear, and you have to be zoomed WAY in to trigger it. As an example I was getting it to show up on model that was 50" x 30" when I was zoomed in close enough to see a detail that was .02".

While the 3Dconnexion does take some getting used to, and there will be some effort to integrating it into your workflow, its a huge timesaver once you’re comfortable with the product.

Dave

16

Thank you. I use the Space Navigator (the one with two buttons) with Rhino for about 2 years but I could see in action the Space Navigator Pro on Windows Rhino to a recent event in my city and I was impressed.

17

I had created a good way to map out the views to the spacepilot and it was working great. Then i closed the Rhino and re-opened it and everything went wonky. All my keyboard shorcuts and mapping still exist but they don’t work. Heres some screenshots of what i have going on:

in system prefrences - 3dconnexion - buttons

In Rhino i have created the shorcuts similar to these:

Screen Shot 2016-01-11 at 8.15.45 PM.png806×772 22 KB

Screen Shot 2016-01-11 at 8.16.25 PM.png804×784 21.9 KB

The only veiws that work are, Prespective View and View:Target to object.

Has anyone done this in a way thats stable?

18

Alright i think i figured it out,

Because i didn’t have anything in Rhinos 3dconnection preferences nothing was happening. I think those option take priority over the 3dconnection preferences in the computers system preferences.

Hopefully this helps someone. Just set it up like i have shown for the spacepilot pro. Button 1 is the menu button. I’m not sure what i want there yet.

I think all the other buttons will respond to macro’s you set up with keyboard shortcuts and then map with 3dconnection preferences in the computers system preferences. I do wish rhino had the options for doing it all in one place tho!

19

Yes, right. 1 button on the preferences of Rhino 3DConnexion corresponds to the key menu also SpaceMouse Pro (which I’m using for about 3 weeks). In fact I can configure the preferences of Rhino 3D Connexion button only 1. All other buttons will configure the preferences of SpaceMouse Pro.

20

Marlin,

New user here. Total neophyte. New to CAD, Rhino and 3DConnexion.

I searched the forums, didn’t see my question yet. A thousand pardons if I’m repeating an old Q tho’.

…
In my haste to get setup, I bought a SpaceMouse Wireless.
I now see that the SpaceNavigator is the only supported 3DCon. product supported, for the moment.

Is there any time frame on when this might change? Or is this something I should be asking 3DConnexion?

I ask because I would like to get up and running soon… or soonish… Should I return this SpaceMouse and buy the SpaceNavigator? Would it be worth holding out until there was broader support for SpaceMouse Pro or other 3DConnexion products?

Any advise is much appreciated.