tl;dr: Is there a way to center the view on the selected object without altering the current “zoom” level?
Long: I’m having a lot of trouble working with Blender simply being able to see what I’m doing. I managed to find a setting that allows the view to rotate around what I’ve selected, which is great, but I can’t find a setting to zoom in/out on what I’ve selected. What would be perfect is an option to zoom in/out on selected, but the only options appear to be either zoom in/out on the viewport center, or on the mouse position. Okay, mouse position is right out, but viewport center will work just fine, if I can move my currently selected vertex to the center of the viewport first. So far, so good. A bit of googling reveals “Numpad .” will center the viewport on my selection, great!
Except using it I end up very, very frustrated as the workflow looks like this: Select vertex. Press “Num-.”. Zoom back out to a useful zoom level where I can actually see what I’m doing. Manipulate as needed. Select next vertex. Press “Num-.” Zoom back out again because Blender has once again zoomed in uselessly close. Select next vertex, press “Num-.”. Zoom back out. Select, “num-.”, start screaming “FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THE GODS STOP MESSING WITH MY ZOOM LEVEL!!!1!” Throw computer out window…
It’s very frustrating. What I really want is for camera movement (not the scene camera, the edit/view camera) to be relative to my selection. Selecting the preference “Rotate Around Selection” gets part-way there: moving the edit camera left/right or up/down is then relative to the selection, but moving in/out is not, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to get it to be. In/out movement seems to only have two options, center of viewport or mouse position. The former would get me what I want if what I have selected is moved to the center of the viewport, but I can’t find a way to do that without simultaneously zooming in uselessly close when I already had the zoom level perfect and didn’t want to change it. I’m going slowly crazy… (er, crazier than I already was, that is…) Is there some key that does this? Or some preference I’ve overlooked to get “Num-.” to stop messing with my zoom level?