different kinds of input devices | 10:49 AM >

First, my latest shot from Animation Mentor:

Two interesting things I found last night.

First is this OSX driver for the 360 Controller for Windows. Works basically as expected, although games on the Mac obviously don't recognize it and have a funny way of using some of the axes. The main pain at the moment is that the shoulder buttons aren't technically buttons -- they come in as the third axis (technically making the 360 controller 5dof), so you can't map them to anything that doesn't recognize pressure-sensitive axes for all inputs. Not that such is a Mac-only issue; I can't get the guy in GTA: Vice City on my PC to turn at all, although I think the PC driver has remapping capabilities. But still, the above Mac driver works brilliantly with most recent games. My hat's off to the developer.

The other thing is recent movement in the SpaceNavigator sphere. Looks like the latest releases of the test viewer now support "3D Joysticks" for movement, camera movement, and build interaction (the latter of which is one of the most important additions in ages). Also, Blender has a second release candidate out for v2.46, into which they quietly snuck support for 6dof devices like the SpaceNavigator. Unfortunately the OSS plugin that acts as a bridge between Blender and the driver seems to have been written blind without any notion for sane defaults, and the rotation speed is so low it's unusable, but it's a good start.

I just wish Maxon would get on board the 6dof train for Cinema 4D on Mac. Works brilliantly with my SN in the Windows demo, but the Mac version is still without support.