Tuesday, November 1, 2011

3D Navigator- Doing the Business

In my extensive experience with the Nav I find that this little device is great for getting around large models.*


The Navigator is easy to install and relatively intuitive to use. The control panel does require a bit of fine-tuning out of the box but that is to be expected- even welcome- with a powerful piece of equipment such as the Nav. (e.g. I have to reverse most of the zoom/ orbit actions to imitate the orientation of the mouse.) The speed of orbit/ zoom is astonishingly fast and one of the great features is that the Nav doesn't require you to "knock on the door" to get through a wall like the mouse scroll-wheel does**. It just whizzes on through like a ghost on speed.

Overall, as far as I'm concerned the Navigator is a definite buy for professionals, especially for those working on large models***

* More so than small models/ details as the speed of zoom is not always suitable for the particular task- sometimes the mouse scroll-wheel is required to provide fine zooming and orbiting.
** I understand that this is so for a good reason and am not saying it is "bad"!
*** No enticements were offered to say this- Not my style.  Just note that when a SketchUp upgrade comes out it usually takes a while before a driver is produced for the Nav : ( but its just about worth waiting for.)

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