Wacom touch tablets with Rhino

Anyone using a new Wacom tablet with Rhino? I just started to with an Intuos5 which has multi-touch abilities. This doesn’t work with Rhino currently but I want to lobby Wacom to make it so. If you use one and agree or disagree, please let me know. They may or may not write plugins for their own devices but it doesn’t hurt to ask :pencil2: + :hand:

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Please excuse this slight hijack @BrianJ.

As an aside, I saw this Logitech Touchpad in the shop yesterday.

http://www.logitech.com/en-au/product/touchpad-t650?crid=1153

Anyone tried it in rhino or non-windows 8 environments.

Shifted to new topic…carry on as before.

sent mine back… like working with touch, but still need to use the pen a lot. The device is supposed to suppress gestures/touch when the pen is within range, but failed repeatedly resulting in cursor jumping between (eg) pen position and palm-heel position. As well as fixing this, IMO the tablet needs a dedicated hardware switch to toggle touch, with a light to show current state.

I have a button top left that toggles the touch part off/on which helps with what you described. I mostly use it because the keyboard is right above and I keep dropping my elbows like the poor typist I am.

The latest driver seems pretty good here at detecting pen vs. touch on Win7 x64 but any hardware will have driver quirks that vary from one OS to another in my experience. I can understand if it just wasn’t good for how you work. The concept is a new one for Wacom and will probably require driver work to evolve.

It doesn’t look like there is much interest in touch enabled modeling from the Rhino users on this forum at the moment but maybe it will become a recurring topic as tablet OS’s expand from web search to design work… which is my prediction.

Sorry for digging up an old topic but I would be interested in tablet support. I might pick up a Wacos Tablet, they are a lot cheaper than I thought they were.

I would love to try them out in Adobe software, I know my Autodesk stuff supports it so to have Rhino support it also would be awesome.

I am very interested in touch and pen based modelling in Rhino.
I have a sony vaio duo 13 convertible laptop with n-trig pen input runnong windows 8.1.
For viewport navigation touch is working very well, the problems I am having are based on the inability to access modifier keys when ising pen input in tablet mode.
A special floating toolbar with “sticky” key buttons would solve this problem.
At the moment I am experimenting with a small utility called “modlock” that creates some on screen buttons, but a Rhino specific solution would be very much appreciated and optimal imho.
Also using gestures to evoke pop-up toolbars, aliases or any kind of command would be a great workflow ehnancement.
A Rhino-touch plug-in with these kind of enhancements would be my dream, and in times of ever more touch enabled pc’s and devices certainly an investment future UI developments.

Cheers, Norbert

Hi Brian,

Got Wacom Cintiq Companion recently. Rhino 5 works like a charm with regular Windows 8 setup plus Bluetooth keyboard/mouse; as you said - not much use for touch features in Rhino so far. Would be great to have it working though for presentation when the Rhino model could be viewed/navigated via touch/multitouch.
Good luck lobbying Wacom!

Been using a Wacom Bamboo and loved it. In general pen input works just like mouse input with Rhino. Be aware of input precision, though. It’s hard to hit the exact same positon, you’ve been hovering over. But that might come with practice. I tend to switch back to the mouse for the more difficult parts where snaps and numerical input don’t help. You can disable click on hit but that will cut down the already few available buttons. Since Rhino uses left, right and middle mouse buttons, you will need all…

Used my Aspire R7 to show our Rhino model of LizardCloud at the Designers’ Open fair.

Touch navigation worked like a charm although orbiting tends to get stuck once you are close to top view. But a quick switch to perspective view will reset that.

I’m using Wacom Intuos (but not the new model with multi-touch, yet).
Just started to learn Rhino. Hope the graphic pen has the same functions as the mouse.
So far I was for the first time using the click on the graphic pen, which I never used in Adobe CS.
FYA - My first question to myself was - Should I switch to mouse while reading Rhino tutorial?
But so far I stick with the pen.

Hi All,

I use a Wacom on one computer currently and only use the stylus, not touch support when working in Rhino. I’m not sure if anyone else in McNeel is using an Intuos 5 and doubt any developers are. Wacom or another plugin developer might be able to write a Rhino plugin to access the touch and gesture ability of these devices but I’m not sure if Rhino’s SDK could use them honestly… @dale anything to confirm or deny on this one?

I do use the trackpad constantly on Mac Rhino though and that is so far becoming a really nice option in my opinion.

I don’t have any experience with the newer Wacom tablets. But I don’t see a why plug-in, which exploits their capabilities, could not be written. Has anyone approached Wacom about this?

Just out of curiosity.
Why does touch and pen input on my windows 8 laptop just work out of the box.
Does wacom use a different touch interface than the windows native?

Norbert

Win7 and Win8 have a Pen/touch Interface. Both are slightly different and should basically expose the pen and touch input in a consistent way, that translates those types to corresponding mouse events.

So if the Wacom drivers implement the correct driver model, it should “just work”, just as it works with the current Pen/Touch displays for Win8.

Only thing is Rhino UI isn’t designed for touch only. Touch+Pen works great though.

I just spent half an hour chatting to a Wacom support about having access to the values of a pen or finger on the tablet. They said I need to contact Rhino and I asked if there’s a Wacom SDK?

The person at Wacom is now also doing some research and I told them I’m just reading this thread.

I imagine a script in Grasshopper where I could read all those values

What’s so difficult to access these values here:

Hi @martinsiegrist,

I’m assuming the contact at Wacom was asking whether or not there is an SDK for Rhino. Obviously they, being Wacom, would know about the availability of their own Wacom SDK.

Anyway, there are SDK available for Rhino.

– Dale

Thanks Dale,

I don’t fully understand the situation yet.

Does the availability of Rhino SDK mean it’s possible to access the readings from a tablet with, let’s say Python inside Grasshopper?

Or what’s missing to access the readings of a Wacom pen tablet?

No. Wacom is going to have to provide an interface for you.

– Dale

Thanks