One of the elements that nearly everyone who uses FreeCAD has on their screen when working in 3D is the Navigation Cube. It provides a simple way of visualizing your orientation in 3D space, and serves as a simple way to navigate to predefined views (“Front”, “Top”, et cetera). A few weeks ago developer “adrianinsaval” (Adrián Insaurralde Avalos) submitted an improvement to the Navigation Cube that makes the corners much easier hit-targets, so it’s now easier to switch to isometric views of your model without going to the menus. Adrián was assisted in this venture by “Rexbas”, “Jolbas” and “donovaly” (Uwe Stöhr), so if you appreciate the new, easier-to-use navigation cube, send your thanks their way.
You can find the feature in the latest development builds of FreeCAD: it will be included in the next full (non-maintenance) release.
2 responses to “The Little Things: Navigation Cube Update”
What would be nice would be to be able to change the mandatory correspondence of X with Right, Z with Top… For example, in aeronautics, Z is indeed Up but X is to the Back and Y is to the Right. In optics, Z is towards back (direction of light), while X is Right and Y is Up.
I too woul like that feature, note that this is somewhat possible in the navicube where you can change the labels for each face. A true custom coordinate system would probably be very complicated to do since I highly doubt that occt and other libraries would support custom coordinate systems.