Keyboard shortcut for setting view center of rotation

When navigating round a renderView, it is very important to be able to reset the view center of rotation. The ‘Pick Center’ button does a great job of this. However, my one complaint about it is that I need to move my cursor up to the button, then back to the renderView in order to perform the operation. This might seem trite, but I’ve used a couple different 3D graphics GUIs with keyboard shortcut implementations of this function, and it really speeds up navigating around a 3D view (especially for CFD data when zooming into boundary layers, other small features). As an example, this is implemented within Tecplot as pressing the ‘o’ key. When you press the ‘o’ key, the view center is set to whatever point in just underneath the cursor at the time.

This would be especially useful with the Mouse Wheel Zooms to Cursor feature that was recently added, since now you can zoom right in to what you want. But once you’re there, it would be great to just press ‘o’ to get the view center set so you can rotate around at that point.

I’m not stuck on copying Tecplot. I think any of a number of possible key or click combinations would be useful, such as ‘c,’ or ‘c’ + ‘LMB,’ or the mouse wheel click. Thanks!

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In Tools → Customize Shortcuts, you can set shortcuts for many things but not for toolbar actions sadly, only for menu items. PickCenter is not present in the menu, but only as a toolbar actions.

In terms of UI design, I think that all toolbars actions should be available also as menus, which would fix the issue you are facing.

Another way to fix it would be to add toolbars actions to the shortcut mechanism, but this would probably duplicate a few things, which I’m not sure we want.

What do you think @cory.quammen @nicolas.vuaille ?

That would be fine, but that’s a lot of menu items to add. We would need to organize them sensibly.

tbh I was only thinking of adding submenu items in the Views → Toolbars items.

Views → Toolbars items.

This sounds like a hotfix to me: Views menu tends to be only a Show / hide GUI element whereas toolbar actions trigger actual things.
I’m more in favor of a reorganization, but I agree that it is more work. Also, we can have a look at adding shortcuts on toolbar actions without putting them in menus.

In fact I’m in favor of a big refactor of the whole UI, but this is anoter story :slight_smile: