Blender 4.3

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.

I'm too old to remember the mappings for 20 button mice, but I've found the lowly Logitech G305 useful because it has a hardware button to toggle between DPI settings. That makes it useful without using any other key to change the speed of the mouse. Other than that, it has four buttons, and the scroll wheel clicks and goes left and right.

Another mouse I'm currently using for 3D stuff is Logitech G502, which also has a DPI toggle switch but more importantly, it has a "soft aim" button which temporarily lower the sensitivity while you hold that button. Great for precision stuff in 2D/3D arts, although I think the original use case is for snipering in video games or something like that.

Nothing beats using a Wacom tablet or similar though, even for boring 3D stuff. Not sure why, but I just end up with ridiculous precision compared to any mouse.