Blender 4.3 | slacker news

From a beginners perspective, a good mouse is crucial for working in these kind of tools. It's touched on at the start of the donut tutorial (linked elsewhere) but I just wanted to re-iterate it here.

Now, I haven't done serious 3d work for many years, and recently tried getting into Blender again on my Mac laptop with a Magic mouse. It was a horrible experience.

Can anyone recommend a good mouse you can buy nowadays (so not something like the original SGI workstation mouse that had 3 buttons and no scroll wheel, unless those are still readily available...I loved them!) that works well in these programs. I remember the key differentiator being the scroll wheel which also acts as the middle button. Getting this wrong can make for a frustrating experience as it will zoom the view while trying to middle click.

One thing that at least doubled my modelling efficiency was my acquisition of a multi-button gaming mouse with a twelve-button thumb grid. In Blender I have that mapped mostly to the numpad which enables 3D navigation at the speed of thought, and without me having to move my other hand away from the cluster of most-often-used hotkeys at the bottom-left of the keyboard. You also get five functions out of the MMB which also can really speed up working in the Node Editor. But. I'm left-handed. The only suitable mouse I can find like this is a Razer Naga Left-Handed Edition, and I don't like the build quality. It's too light and small for my hand, and on the two specimens I've used, the MMB is a little bit glitchy (occasionally registering scrolling the wrong way, and click turns into push-left or push-right). So I wouldn't be without it, but I wish there were better options.