Blender 2.8 Touch Navigation Proposal (for tablets/mobile)

Hello everyone. Since Blender 2.8 runs on a newer version of OpenGl, adapting it for touch screen devices ( such as Android or Windows tablets ) might be a more feasible task. This proposal aims to suggest a different kind of navigation, adapted for these kind of devices.

Let's first talk about how you navigate in Unreal Engine 4. W,A,S,D keys control the camera movement across a horizontal plane, while Q and E control the movement on a vertical one. (Up and Down). On a touch screen, we could get these movements by sliding two or three fingers on the screen.

Blender could have two navigation modes for touch screen devices, toggleable with a button in the toolbar. These navigation modes are called:

I Free Navigation -this is the default navigation mode. Here is how it works:

1. When you hold a finger on the screen, then move it towards the right end of it, the camera rotates to the right. Same with up, down and left.
2. When you hold two fingers on the screen, you can move the camera on the horizontal plane. So if you slide the fingers towards the bottom of the screen, the camera moves forward. If you slide the fingers towards the top of the screen, the camera moves backwards. Same with left and right.
3. If you slide on the screen with three fingers, when you slide up, the camera will go down, and when you slide up, it goes down.

All of these options could be inverted in the settings.

** II - Cursor Centric Navigation ** -this mode is enabled by pressing that button

This mode takes the 3D Cursor as a pivot, and the camera is always oriented towards it. When you select the 3D Cursor in the toolbar and place it somewhere else, the camera snaps automatically to a new rotation, to have it in the middle of the screen.

So, in this mode:

1. Using a single finger, you can rotate the whole view around the Cursor (turntable).
2. Using two fingers, you can get closer or farther away from the Cursor, as well as to his left and to his right.
3. Using three fingers, you you can move the camera up and down, relative to the rotation of the Cursor. So if the 3D Cursor is rotated 180 degrees to the left, the camera view will also be rotated 180 degrees to the left, so you will see the scene from bottom to top instead of from top to bottom.

Other thoughts

By swapping these modes, you can easily concentrate to a region, and in the same time move around when you need more flexibility.

For selecting stuff, you do a short tap on the object or component that you want to select.

Tapping shortly the screen with 3 fingers could open a global pie menu, where you could select modes.

This proposal could work for both modelling and sculpting, but in sculpting mode the rotation of the camera is done with two fingers.