I was trying to create a video for some co-workers the other
day and couldn't get Maptek Vulcan to behave as I wanted. The video was just a
screen capture of a new topography triangulation rotating on screen. Nothing too dramatic
but it was marred by the big rotation center in the middle of the screen. From
my days working for Maptek I remembered that there was a keystroke that would
hide just the center of rotation icon but for the life of me I couldn't remember what it was. I bet I hit every button on my keyboard a dozen times
trying to figure out which key hid that silly icon. I switched to the alternate
color palette (‘a’ key), I changed the direction of the light source (‘l’ key)
and I even displayed the extents of all the data on the screen (‘e’ key) but I couldn't find the right key to hide the center of rotation icon.
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| Vulcan screen shot WITH center of rotation icon. |
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| Vulcan screen shot WITHOUT center of rotation icon. |
To make matters worse, I couldn't find the Vulcan help page
that lists all the hotkeys. Maptek is just like every other supplier of
software, they think that their help is the most intuitive thing in the world
and that you can find anything just by taking logical steps. I've got news for
Maptek and the rest of the software developers in the world, ‘Your help stinks!' It is crazy and backward unless I already know where to find what I am looking
for, and if I already know where to find my answer in the online help, chances
are pretty good that I remember how to use the tool and don’t need to find it
in the help in the first place.
This is a really hard thing to complain about because once
you have finally found what you are looking for it seems incredibly obvious and
you can’t believe you didn't look there in the first place. For future
reference, the keystroke to hide the center of rotation icon is:
alt+a
The complete list of hotkeys for Maptek Vulcan is located in
the online help at:
Envisage 3D Editor > Keyboard Controls
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| Envisage keyboard controls. Also known as 'hotkeys.' |
If you have never looked through the hotkeys in Vulcan you
should really spend a minute to see what you have been missing. There are saved
views that can be set up by using shift+number keys. You can change the color
palette or enter a rotate mode without clicking on the screen. You might even
realize that the dozens of straight lines that sometimes appear on the screen
when you accidentally start typing on the keyboard with the Envisage window active
are really just the extents of every object on the screen and can be turned off
again by pressing the ‘e’ key.
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