Taming mouse-camera rotate behavior?

[gwideman]

I have spent a few hours with Wings3D, to some good effect.

But one thing I have not mastered is how to get camera movement ("scene rotation") to behave.

Here I'm talking about clicking the mouse wheel to perform "Tumble" mode.

The mouse up-down motion always maps to rotating the scene about an axis that's horizontal relative to the screen, and passes through the origin. This behaves uniformly no matter the scene orientation.

By contrast, the mouse left-right motion rotates only around the Y axis, regardless of the position of the scene. Further, the Y axis seems to be constrained to a plane that's normal to a horizontal line on the screen.

This has two implications:

-- One mouse direction maps to a screen-relative motion, while the other maps to an model-relative motion -- rather disorienting.

-- There seems no way to get certain views: For example, how do I position the scene so that the Y-axis appears horizontal on the screen, and the Z axis vertical? Is this actually impossible?

Thanks. Graham