View Cube

Am I crazy? I’m trying to get blender setup on a laptop for my daughter. I’m 100% sure I’ve enabled an Autodesk style Viewcube type navigation thingy in user preferences before and immediately turned it back off because it’s easier to use the keypad and other shortcuts for view navigation, but for a 7 year old and on a laptop, the viewcube just makes sense.

Where is this option? Have I lost my mind? Is this some add-on that I had on my other computer?

One thing that might help with this is an Addon you can enable in 3D View:

https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/3D_interaction/3D_Navigation

There is also Layer Management addon you can enable to make layer navigation easier. I guess you know if she does not have a numpad you can use “emulate numpad” in preferences.

There is a viewcube on github but I have not gotten it to work. A comment says it is not functional. So I don’t know what is up.

Thanks, Richard. I’ll set up the addon you suggested.

It looks like the viewcube is a feature in the 2.8 alpha builds. I knew I’d seen it somewhere. Unfortunately, the feature I wanted to teach her to use isn’t working in 2.8 yet.

If she’s just 7 and learning starting with Blender (and hopefully staying with) would it not be better to have an impressionable mind built to learn the best way to do stuff?

Whilst it may be easier to hack it for her, in the longer term she could be an expert going native.