3Dconnexion SpacePilot Pro 3D Mouse 3DX-700036

As a computer animator I spend all day long working in 3ds max. By the end of the day my mouse hand is fatigued and I've been through a dozen mice trying to find some relief but no mouse seemed to be a fix all. I was skeptical but I finally decided to try the space pilot pro. I went with the more expensive version because I wanted more button options. I have to say that I love this thing! It makes camera and view navigation so much easier and I rarely have to use the middle mouse button on my mouse anymore which helps greatly with fatigue. If you spend all day in cad, this is a life saver on the hand and as well as productivity. There is a bit of a learning curve and you definitely need to customize everything to the way that you need it for your specific tasks, but I was rolling with it within a couple hours. My only complaint however is that even with the pro model, there really aren't enough buttons. Yes, there are a lot but I still find myself having to frequently move to the keyboard for other hotkeys. The LCD screen is really nothing more than a gimmick, and is fairly useless. Why would I check my email on a tiny LCD screen when I have three computer monitors in front of me? I would rather they use all that wasted space for additional programmable buttons. Other than that I love it and a will be a life long user of these. Read more

The 3D Connexion Space Pilot is a usefull tool, when you get used to it, it improves your working efficiency. The only thing that I dont like is that for Solid Edge it reduces the program speed when you are using complex assemblies. If you try to move the assembly aroing while trying to do some functions, the program will run very slow! Read more

For what this product does, it's perfect. I use it in Autodesk's 3DS Max, and it is incredible. It'll take about a week or so to get all of the shortcut keys customized to your liking and to acclimate yourself to the degree of control it offers (it's very intuitive, but it does have more degrees of control than your average gamer is used to in a joystick, for sure). It's ridiculously sensitive and it doesn't require calibration (though the driver suite offers that capability just in case). My only complaints are that the driver support from 3DConnexion is poor and it took a bit of finagling to get the plugin for 3DS Max working perfectly; also, TRAGICALLY, the product isn't truly compatible with Pixologic's Zbrush 4 (there are some beta drivers out there but they don't really work all that great). Read more

So I'm writing this a an environment artist who works in 3d Studio Max, Zbrush, and Photoshop. First off, this does not work in Zbrush. On the 3dconnexion forums, they claim Pixologic should support 3d mice. Pixologic says they won't play favorites and add integration for custom hardware, but have supplied 3dconnexion with the Zbrush sdk, so they should be able to work it out. I'm inclined to agree, especially with the magic others have been able to accomplish via plugins (decimation master and the amazingly awesome UV master). Great hardware. Terrible driver support. For $300, this thing should damn near make me breakfast every morning. Pro: The thing that upsets me the most is that the hardware, when it works as intended, is fantastic. Once you get over the initial learning curve, navigating in 3d Studio Max is so fluid and natural. I would liken it to getting used to playing a FPS with a mouse and keyboard to playing Halo on an xbox controller for the first time. The inclusion of the function buttons that can be remapped greatly increases viability as a tool for modeling, rather than just viewport navigation. You can even set up buttons to have an alternate function for a long press, so I've got a short press on one button to open a group and a long press closes the group. Bound some other stuff to remove edges and connect edges \ verts, quick align, show wireframe, etc. Con: And that's the infuriating part: 3dconnexion already has a great, intuitive, and highly functional UI for assigning macros or keys to function buttons as well as invert axis inputs on the controller cap, but you can only use that UI \ driver interface on supported, detected, and actively running applications, so if Max isn't running, and the last program you clicked on before going to the 3dconnexion control panel, you can't modify the inputs related to Max. Also, note that this does not function as an actual mouse. You can only fly around the viewport, so you still need a mouse and keyboard to edit models. It would be wicked awesome if you could navigate to a point, tap a button to switch to cursor mode, use the thing as a ThinkPad style nubby mouse controller, select things, then go back to navigation mode. I'm sure you could hack something together, but, again, 300 bucks! TLDR; amazing device, terrible driver support. For $300, you should not need to hack together an xml file or download legacy beta drivers to use a broken implementation of functionality in Zbrush. If you just want it for a supported application, you might be happy, but if you want to customize and use this device to function in other applications or remap inputs to joystick x, y, you'll be disappointed. P.S. if you want to almost completely remove the keyboard from your workflow, try using an MMO gaming mouse. One of those with a million buttons on the thumb side. I've managed to map anything that didn't easily fit on the function buttons to a Logitech G600. I'm now zooming along in Max and it feels like I'm working some sort of future computer from the future. Read more