Hey Guys,

Check out this app featured on techcrunch, you have camera controls and modeling ability from your ipad.

Maide Turns Your iPad Into A 3D Controller | TechCrunch

The best demos are the ones that extend your sense of what's possible a little, and Maide's did just that. I usually think of iPads as display devices that also support input; but Maide Control uses the tablet almost exclusively for input, which vastly expands the potential richness and repertoire of the interface. They've targeted 3D design and modelling as their initial market, aiming to replace dedicated 3D mice from companies like 3DConnexion, but I can see variants being used for things like strategy games and media editing too. It's a simple notion: the app connects your iPad (wirelessly) to a big monitor used for 3D design, and then you use multi-touch gestures to zoom, pan, and rotate around that design, and to sketch, add, edit, and erase. It's pretty easy to use, too -- even I, who failed first-year drafting as an engineering student, found it slick and semi-intuitive. You can hook up multiple iPads to the same design to collaborate, and I expect they'll eventually let users add and customize a personal palette of input/editing options. Here's their official launch video:

TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)

here is a demo on youtube:

The zoom tool (magnifying glass invoked by the Z shortcut) does not zoom to where the mouse courser is, it zooms to the guessed target.

The orbit has a vertical and a horizontal axis of rotation. The vertical axis is always in the z direction going through the origin. The horizontal axis is always in the camera x axis direction going through a point which is new every time a mouse is clicked...that point is the guess target I think...that said, the guess target might be a function of some bounding box.

An intersection with a geometry and a ray shot from the camera eye seems like a reasonable assumption. There are several possible uses for a guess target. I think some of the Camera tools in sketchup (zoom, orbit and such) are using the guessed target to know where to zoom or to figure out the vertical axis of rotation.

I was wondering if anybody knows how the View.guess_target works? What is the algorithm of guessing the target?

Working on a viewing/walk though/demo plugin. It will allow to create a walk through path and several other options. One of the options is an orbit path. If the center of the orbit is not specified I want it to do whatever sketchUp does.

Does anybody know what exactly the native sketchup orbit tool does? I am trying to emulate it programmatically by applying a rotation transformation around the camera left or up vector (depending on the required direction) with the origin being at the camera target, this is what makes sense to me for the orbit, but it is not what the sketchup orbit is doing.

So what exactly is it orbiting around?