Houdini 20.0 Basics

3D Mouse Input

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Overview

Houdini supports using a 3D mouse for changing the view in the 3D viewport currently underneath the regular mouse cursor. If the regular mouse cursor is not currently over any 3D viewport, then the first Scene Viewer pane’s selected viewport will be modified.

Microsoft Windows

The 3DxWare 10 for Windows (64-bit) driver is required. All SpaceMouse ® Enterprise buttons are supported, including the view memories. To configure the buttons for enhanced functionality, please see the instructions in $HFS/houdini/public/3DxWare/README.

Mac OS X

The 3DxWare 10 for OS X driver is required. Only the following buttons are supported: tilt, top/bottom, front/back, right/left, iso1/iso2, fit. The view memory buttons on the SpaceMouse ® Enterprise are not currently supported by the driver.

Linux

One of the following 3D mouse drivers are required

  • 3DxWare for Linux (x86-64). Only limited button support and may not work with newer Linux distributions. Note that the SpaceMouse ® Enterprise is NOT supported in this driver.

  • Spacenav for most 3D mouse devices and Linux distributions with limited button support.

Spacenav Setup

To use the 3D mouse with Spacenav, it’s recommended to use the latest revision from its source repository. spacenavd 0.6 had bugs which prevented the SpaceMouse ® Enterprise from being recognised. Houdini was tested using this device using revision 192 from the source repository.

Sample installation from source via the shell:

$ svn co -r192 svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/spacenav/code/trunk spacenav
$ cd spacenav/spacenavd
$ ./configure
$ make install # installs to /usr/local/bin

The spacenav daemon must be running prior to starting Houdini. This can be done using these commands:

$ sudo /usr/local/bin/spacenavd # add -v option for verbose info
$ sudo /usr/local/bin/spnavd_ctl x11 start
$ cat /var/log/spnavd.log

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