Two mice with different action
I have a mouse and a simple Logitech trackball. Both show up as a mouse in Windows, and in Blender their operation is currently identical.
I would like to use the trackball for 3D rotating the scene (without any additional key), rather than it moving the mouse pointer.
4 Comments
I think if OS (Windows) not have this behavior with several tens of thousand of developers , it is a bit hard that some tens of Blender developer can make working this feature in Blender. Maybe someone one day will add this in Blender for fun, or you can decide to make it for all Blender community, opensource permit this
* @NiCapp * Unless the OS supports this behavior I don't think it's feasible as a feature in Blender
* @kidtempo * Blender VR/XR when full implemented will must support 6 axis pointer device, use one device with 2 series of sensor or two devices with one series od sensor will be same. Blender will not support devices as pointer device because OS not manage them, i find hard that Blender developer start write OS driver to manage this kind of input
* @NiCapp * Yeah, but that's not the same thing.
Something like a 6-axis device will have drivers written for it by their manufacturer. The OS developers might create a generic API interface for various device manufacturers to use as a unified way of creating drivers.
Since mice have been around for a really long time this interface support lots of extra features like scroll wheels, additional buttons, and probably a bunch of other nich things. This interface sends input to the pointer controller which moves the pointer around the screen (and a VR API would probably be similar but different, and probably wouldn't be interfacing with the pointer controller but use its own thing).
There are already multiple different APIs (or may be part of one giant API depending on the OS) - to support other types of devices like touchpads, touch screens, tablets, pens, etc. but they all feed into the pointer controller - something outside developers have little/no freedom to change because the OS relies on that pointer controller working in a single consistent way. That's why I don't think I've ever seen a device which allows the user to have (for example) two pointers on screen at the same time. You can use two devices (e.g. a mouse and a touchpad) but they will both only be able to move that singular pointer, because their input is funneled through the pointer controller which wasn't designed to allow the devices to function as two independent controllers of different things.
I'm not saying that it wouldn't be useful - for example using a mouse/trackball to rotate the scene while at the same time sculpting with a pen tablet would be cool - it's just that it would take hacking the OS and hacking Blender and maybe also writing custom drivers APIs in order to allow it. That's a pretty tall order for a very niche set of users to expect Blender to put resources into it.