List Price: $299.00
Sale Price: $295.00
Today's Bonus: 1% Off
I bought this device here from Amazon a few months ago and wanted to give it a real workout before I wrote a review. I can't even describe how painful it would be to try and model something without this on my desk going forward. It's literally like reaching into your monitor and grabbing a mesh with your hand while you work on it with your regular mouse. That's not to say its a completely natural thing to pick up right away I imagine it has about the same learning curve as a Segway, where at first you'd swear a sneeze would cause you to run over the nearest 6 yr old, but soon with a little practice you're chasing down geese around the park while that tour guide is yelling at you. It comes with a little training program that helps, and the software lets you setup sensitivites in various axes to tune it to your liking. Took me about a week to really settle in to using it 100%, and most of that was breaking old habits.
The main benefit is really time savings. Even with extra mice buttons and keyboard shortcuts, you really cant Pan and Orbit and Zoom simultaneously with a standard planar 2D mouse. This guy has 6 degrees of freedom and can handle all that no problem. Often you have to stop whatever operation you're doing to manuever your work object and then go back to that operation. With this thing, it's like the program doesn't even know you're handling the object. Also, its got like 15 some buttons you can program (incl one that pops up an on-screen numpad) so you almost never need to touch the keyboard. I can honestly say after months of use, I'm completing projects 2-3 times faster than I was previously... and if that's worth $300 to you then definitely buy this bad boy right now.
To be fair and balanced, here's some of the downsides. Make sure you go to their website and do a product search for which software applications you can use this for before you get it. For example, it would be genius if this thing worked in either Mudbox or ZBrush for digital sculpting and painting. I stink at both those programs and it works great in 3DS Max so no problems for me personally though I do tend to grab it when working in UDK and wonder why nothing's happening. I also wish it had a simple power switch on it somewhere... One so it doesnt draw power off the USB port when I'm not using it, and two cuz when I hop into a game of BF3 I often wonder why my guy has Parkinsons until I remember to crawl under my desk and unplug this device.
Other than that LED is nice and strong, it's never lost calibration, never crashed a driver, hasn't given me carpaltunnel and it doesnt bug me about software updates every 7 days. Best thing I have connected to my computer.
0 comments:
Post a Comment