Rotate on this ...

When holding down 'Ctrl' to rotate a selection, one or even two of the wheels will sometimes be more or less level with the camera's line of view and clicking a wheel in that view will snap the object to a completely inappropriate angle. In more than two years of building in SL, I have never managed to get comfortable with this behaviour. I know the obvious solution is to reset the view so all the wheels are at some angle or other and rotate the object more sensitively but that isn't always convenient. This trick gets me every time.

Is it a useful function? Is there a way to disable it until I work out how to use it properly?

Or is it just a pain in the ass that we have to work around?

Yes.
No.
Yes.

No, no, yes.

Oh no.

Maybe you can turn off grids?

What I really hate is when it's decided you're missed all three circles and startes rotating it randomly in 3d.

Yeah, I always keep the grid turned off. I trust my eye for freeform stuff and I use round measurements and angles for geometric builds. That way it's easy to just calculate coordinates and angles as I go.

I think the missing wheels must be a Mac thing. I haven't experienced it on the PC.

nah, it's not a mac thing, just an odd view angle thing.... simetimes it's just impossible to click the wheel and you get white, which is fre form rotate that isn't useful at all (completely counter intuitive to use)

you can prevent the snapping if you don't move your mouse too far away from the wheel, otherwise it treats it as if you had handled it from the nearest points where another rotation wheel crossed it...

I'm running Second Life on my Wintendo, under Windows 2000.

I could have sworn I read mention of you using a Mac, Argent.

I'm running Windows XP with an nVidia graphics card but I haven't yet noticed any serious visual glitches with the building tools. I asked this question in the first place because SL is really my first experience of 3D design and I had been thinking this snap rotate thing was some kind of convenience feature for practiced hands.

As for the disappearing wheel, I think I've seen that happen if I press Alt prematurely with Ctrl as I go to pan my view. I agree with Void: it's completely counter-intuitive if I can't find a use for it after nearly two years of regular building practice.

Yes, and UNIX, and VMS, and RSX, and all kinds of things back to Honeywell/GE Series 6 and Sperry-Univac 1100.

When I have a random rotation surprise, I mutter my secret curse ("#%$*&**!" and hit CTRL-Z. The sun comes out again, birds start singing, and my object magically springs back to its previous rotation. Some days I have to use that Undo curse a dozen times or more. I'm a slow learner.

the snap to is useful... just a bit too oversensitive for rotations

That's exactly what I do. Trouble is it gets very tedious on a large build. I had to rotate 250 tiny prims one by one during the course of yesterday and I notice I've developed an habitual "should I? shouldn't I? aw sh!t I've gone done it again" glitch in my concentration because of it.


That's the bit that really bugs me. I haven't worked out what it's for after all this time.

I tend to work on scripted rotations, but there are occasions I want a piece exactly 90, 45 or 22.5 degrees rotated, (most of the other snap points are useless to me, and they need 30 and 60 in there) and it's useful for that IF you know that you have to grab a certain point on the wheel to get the easiest logical access to snapping (it's treated as a handle from the local relative nearest bounding box face if that makes sense, or the nearest point where the wheels cross in local mode, if that's easier)