Dear Reallusion Developers!

Almost every 3D software package has built in support for Space Navigator today. The 3D mouse is the perfect tool for moving, rotating camera freely and naturally in space, at six level of freedom. I'm using it with 3DS Max, Rhinoceros, Blender and Photoshop, but there are hundreds of softwares supporting it:

http://www.3dconnexion.com/supported-software/software0.html

Since I've tried it, normal mouse navigation became a real pain. When I first seen iClone, I was happy with the endless possibilities of the program, and all the cool stuffs I ever dreamed about before, but then came the cold shower: it does not support SpaceNav. What?! I didn't believed it.

Camera animation is one of the most problematic area in making professional quality machinimas. Keyframing is not an intuitive way, especially for smooth, precise movements, helicopter-like flyby-s, artistic, fine, variable speed zooms, dollys, crabs. In these areas SpaceNavigator is the ace of aces.

Some places, where the support would be cool in iClone:

- view navigation in editor mode
- realtime camera movement capture (generating keyframes)
- prop movements, rotation
- facial or body expression animation (up to six independent parameters at once!)

For a great implementation check Second Life. That has a nice control panel to customize the influence of each axes, set inertia for contols and function mapping.

From technical viewpoint SpaceNavigator is a normal HID (Human Interface Device) USB device, the readout is the same as any joystick. (I am hobby coder, it took about one hour to write a small camera navigation program in Java...)

I know that the developement schedule of iClone is tight, and it's good to see the quickly widening feature-set, but please re-consider the SpaceNavigator (or general HID) support too, because without this your product stays just a cool toy, not the heaven of machinima makers.

Sorry for my poor english...