- rotation about a face seems to be an afterthought. As it stands you need to hold shift and middle mouse to rotate around the scene. Not sure if there is even a way to orient around a face or object. This is particularly frustrating in assembly mode when you want to see how parts are being constrained against each other and test those constraints.
this reminds me of every other horrible 3d tool that I've used that ends up landing you with a insanely rotated object that you have to hunt for a "reset this viewport for the love of god please!" button. Either that or deal with that fact that you're gimbal locked and just try to unwind the frantic mouse movements you just made.
- zoom - one of the first things I had to do was hunt down the way to change how the mousewheel worked in inventor. By default, scroll up zooms out.. why? anyhow, luckily this was asked before me and there is an option to fix it (http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Inventor-General/Scroll-wheel-reversal/td-p/580626)
- mates in solidworks are presented in a consistent fashion - inventor seems to have split personality when it comes to mates vs constraints (but when you really think about it they are the same thing). For instance in the attempt of making some objects
concentricthere is much hunting and searching involved. Solidworks is not perfect in the regard (its lack of hotkeys), but the important thing is that all of the options have been designed to fit into a dialog that stays out of your workarea. This cannot be said for inventor.
seems solid, but gets messy as the pattern constraints are also displayed. perhaps there is a way to turn that off...
In the end I was able to get this going, but am not pleased with the workflow. Perhaps this is just a user problem, we'll see.
