I'm new to Vue and there are a few things I can't work out about the interface. I'm sure there must be a way, but it isn't clear to me. 1) Selection. Suppose I have a cube inside another cube. I want to select the inner one with the mouse. How do I do it? I don't want to be driven to selecting it from the manifest, when I can see it in front of me (in wireframe view). 2) Rotation. When rotating things I usually want to rotate something 90 or 180 degrees, but I can't see any way to constrain Vue's rotation to whole degrees, and I don't want to have to type the rotation in. 3) Viewing panes. It often happens that I will have one viewing pane maximised and I want to switch quickly to another one (also maximised). I can't see any way to do this, and I find myself having to go through 4-pane view every time. Surely there must be hot keys for switching views? I just can't find them. These are the sorts of things that are often not very well documented, so I'm hoping someone can put me right.

1. it is better to select its name in the world browser. Your mouse cannot know, when you click inside a "double" cube, which one YOU want to select. 2. if you don't want to write by hand the x, y and z coordinates, you must accept what is written in. 3. You have no choice, you first must go back to the 4 views before you can select anther maximised view. Guitta

That is a shame. I'm more experienced with Bryce, and was hoping to find Vue a good alternative. The great advantage that Bryce has is that it has such an efficient user interface for laying out complex scenes, though it seems to me that Vue is a better landscape modeller. I would like the power of Vue, but ease of use is an important issue for intensive work. Point 1 - Your mouse can indeed know. Ctrl-click in Bryce and up comes a pop-up menu with all the items under the cursor; click the one you want. VERY efficient. There is something similar in Rhino. Picking things off the world browser is much less effective, particularly when you have a lot of objects with similar names. Point 2 - It is so common to want to rotate something exactly 90 or 180 degrees. Having to go to typing this is not so smart. If you rotate by mouse you end up with 90.1789 degrees or something. Now if you ever wanted THAT, it would be reasonable to have to type it in. Interface design should make common tasks easier than less common ones. Point 3 - One of the pleasures of Bryce is the ease with which you can switch views with single-stroke hotkeys arranged conveniently on the keyboard. Poser has terribly planned hotkeys for view changing (Ctrl+; yuk), but it least it has some. Why none in Vue? It seems E-on have a little way to go in getting the interface to peak efficiency.

Heheh I agree with finding the interface a bit cumbersome at the moment, but hey, I've only had it a day! But Phantast has some good points, I was sort of digging around for some easy accessible dials and menus and hotkeys and couldn't find any. Looking at Guitta's answer obviously there aren't any - or not many. I shall prevail, nevertheless! Silke - still reading that manual. Sort of. reaches for post-it note to stick on another page

My two cents.. Maybe you work with Vue 4... but in Vue Pro there is a nice option allowing you to define the resolution of a snapgrid as helper for moving or rotation of objects... (You press shift while moving or rotating..) Don't expect to find the precision of Rhino in Vue it's not technical work oriented anyway ... also as I am used to the six vues of Rhino what I do is save needed camera positions and work on world view (F7 display main view only.. Alt+Enter = fullscreen)... When the cursor is in a view a hint message tells you which object will be selected when you click (avoid cluttered views by hiding/locking unnecessary layers) etc... It's always hard to adapt to soft interfaces but Vue is really great and has many other advantages you'll discover and to my opinion, they more than make up for adaptation time loss... Paul

"3) Viewing panes. It often happens that I will have one viewing pane maximised and I want to switch quickly to another one (also maximised). I can't see any way to do this, and I find myself having to go through 4-pane view every time. Surely there must be hot keys for switching views? I just can't find them."

Hello, Phantast --

[I am new to Vue, too.]

I found out, by accident, that I can quickly switch from a maximized view to a minimized view by double-clicking on the view name in the upper left hand corner of the view pane box. This works in reverse, too.

Hope that this helps.

Yes, but that's not what he wanted. He wanted to swich between maximized views for all the windows :-)

gebe- Actually, the Phantast that I am familiar with is a "she"..... :) Hope that it helped, anyway.

The menu color bars have switched to blue, I see......

Yes, members have voted for this color. So I have quickly changed our Vue header too:-)

I think there are two issues here; one is adapting to change, and the other is interface and functionality. Obviously, one has to be prepared to adapt to a new environment for a new program. Especially when it has different features that require a different organisation. That is something I am quite prepared for. I'm not quite so happy when things I expect to be there are not, especially when they are simple things that relate to very common practices. It would be silly to complain about no high-end particle systems when that is a big feature that would require a lot of work and many people would never need. Basic tools for quick and easy navigation of the program are easy to implement, though. If they are missing, it suggests that the developer hasn't been thinking things through very well. Constraining rotation is a good example. The software implementation of such a feature is as difficult as adding one line of code that says rotation = nearest_integer(rotation) so if it isn't there it's not because it is a difficult feature to do, but because no-one has thought to themselves, "Which is more common? Wanting to rotate by eye to precision less than one degree, or to precision exactly one degree?". I think the answer to that is fairly self-evident. You see this a lot in Poser. I'm convinced that no-one at Curious Labs uses Poser very much, or they would fix all the irritating little things about the program that one keeps coming up against and which would be so easy to fix. (Open Source Poser. There would be an idea.) There's much to be said, in software design, of writing the User Guide before a line of code is written. Then write the program to match the Guide, not vice versa. I'm sure this would prevent a lot of usability issues. The reason I bother about this so much is because much of my time at the moment is spent doing 3D comics where a lot of panels need to be done fairly quickly. It means I don't have a lot of time to devote to each picture, so the more efficient is the interface of the programs I use, the more the program helps me to work quickly.

Phantast, e-onsoftware is searching for a programmer at this moment (see in the jobs section at their site). What about you?? Then we would get a much better Vue d'Esprit in a near future (by the way I'm very happy with what I have:-))

Hi Phantast, XENOPHONZ, welcome here! Nice to see known faces again (didn't know that Phantast was a she ;-). Hope I see a lot of pictures from you here and elsewhere :-)). best regards - Walter

Hello, Tintifax. And thanks.