I used to have a 3dconnexion Space Navigator years go, but barely used it and got rid of it after a while. I wasn’t that interested in animation and controlling the camera at the time.
I just bought an old second hand 3dconnexion Space Pilot from eBay and have spent hours just flying around an unfinished model rather than actually doing any more work on it It’s fun
I’v e noticed though that when Fly/Walk navigation is turned on that a problem arises. I have a model of a room. As I fly the view towards the back of the the inputs slow right down until rotation or movement backwards, forwards or up and down slow to a crawl. I have just noticed now that this might be related to the scene’s origin, where X and Y are at 0. The movement picks up again after passing that point. Is there any way round this? I could of course move all the objects in the scene so that the origin was centered inside the room, but that will just move the slow movement area there instead of the back of the room in the scene. That will work for many projects, but isn’t ideal if I want to “fly” the camera through that area.
I thought I could get round it by ignoring fly/walk and instead using Lock Camera to View, but that doesn’t seem to work very well with a 3d mouse type device.
I’ve had a play around with the 3d Mouse setting in Blender, as it appears these are used instead of any settings set in the 3dconnexion software, but haven’t made any progress.
Having said all that, it is a fun thing to play with especially in Blender 2.8. I’m not sure I would ever use it practically while actually modelling, but it’s great for viewing a scene or fine tuning camera placement.
Yeah it’s really fun to use once you customize it, and it can help with avoiding repetitive strain Injury (RSI) i use it to scroll in chrome too, and in a lot of other applications, inputmapper used to have a feature where you can keymap and customize the 3dconnexion extensively, and i don’t know if he still supports it in the latest updates though
MMB in Fly/Walk Navigation teleports the viewport forward. For me that’s all it does. The problem for me is the difference between controlling the view in Fly/Walk mode with the WASD keys (and using scrollwheel to control movement speed) and controlling the view with the 3dconnexion device. Movement with the keyboard (and mouse for turning) seems linear. Movement with the 3d mouse tails off the nearer I get to the scene origin.
On top of the other stuff, it looks like there’s a bug in 2.8 when trying to use Lock Camera to View with a NDOF device. It’s been reported by someone else. That feature works flawlessly in 2.79 and sidesteps my initial problem completely if it can be fixed in 2.8.
Might want to try again. I got a super old 3Dconnexion the spacepilot 3D and it works great. I was having some strange problem, but going into edit > preferences > Keymap > 3D View and unchecking everything that says it’s using NDOF except for the NDOF Orbit View with Zoom seemed to fix all the problems. Now it works great. I’m thinking there was a conflict with the input trying to do more than one thing.
It’s fun 