The Mouse

A mouse is essential in Ligno3d Designer.  It is impossible to use the program properly without a mouse, trackball, or equivalent device.  A two-button mouse with scrolling wheel is also desirable, but not absolutely essential.

For menus, toolbars, dialog boxes and non-3D views, L3DD’s mouse usage follows the standard Windows conventions, and needs no instruction.

In L3DD’s 3D view, however, the mouse adopts some specialized behaviors that are, nevertheless, very easy to learn.

These notes apply to 3D view where most of L3DD’s work is done.  The 3D view has five special modes of operation with distinctive cursors that signal different actions for the left mouse button.  In Normal Mode, indicated by the standard mouse pointer cursor, the following actions apply:

Right Button   The right button, held down, is used to rotate the entire scene (XYZ axes and groundplane included) in all 3D view modes.  Try it.  A single right button click, without moving the mouse, will display a context menu.

Left Button   In normal mode the left mouse button has two main uses.  It selects vertices, edges and faces.  Held down, it moves the entire scene left and right, or up and down, in sympathy with the mouse.

Double Click - Left Button Double click on a face with the left mouse button to select an entire component.  This will only work if the face belongs to a named component.  The name of the component appears in the selection pane of the Status Bar.

Scroll Wheel   The wheel moves the entire scene closer of further away

Shift Left Button   When the Shift Keys is held down the left mouse button is used for group selection --- i.e., selecting multiple vertices, edges and faces - and also for symmetrical selection.

The special cursors and actions of the left mouse button in the special modes are described in the next section - Special Cursors.

Copyright © Ligno3D Systems, 2006