I have been using Blender for about 3 months and gained a reasonable skill level with it.
One thing I am not clear about is the co-ordinates. When you start you have the y in vertical direction and x horizontal. Fine.
When pressing ctl and 0 to get camera view the x, y plane is lying horizontally with z pointing upwards. So either camera is rotated or model by 90 degrees to view properly.
Please explain somebody!
The camera is created facing away from wherever your view is pointing.
0 switches to the camera, ctrl-0 SETS the camera. This is very important! Try just 0 instead.
I tried pressing 0 and it has same effect as ctl-0 keys.
The other wierd thing is that the ground grid is drawn in the x-y plane (rather than x-z plane) again suggesting x-y plane should be horizontal.
Please explain what why this is the case - I’m confused.
contral, numpad numbers does the optosite of what just the regular numpad numbers do
7 is up, so if you pres cntrl 7, it shoows you the bottom view
1 is front view, cntrl 1 is back view
0 only goes to the camera and displays what the camera ses, cntrl 0 doesnt apply as there is no inverse of the camera lense
Okay, I am fine with that. ctl-0 and 0 both give camera view.
Still not understanding why :
camera defaults to being upright in z direction rather than upright in y direction.
ground grid is being drawn in x-y plane.
This situation is the same on both my installation at home and also in work so it is not an issue with the installation being corrupt but some feature I am not getting!!!
Please explain.
It is the convention blender uses – x,y is the ground and z is the elevation. This is also the convention most engineering software uses x and y are the easting and northing with z being the elevation.
GreyBeard
I did suspect this might be the case!
Blender has the mathematically correct way of doing things - its just the other 3d software I have used chooses different (Poser/DAZ Studio).
From Wiki -->
Once the x- and y-axes are specified, they determine the line along which the z-axis should lie, but there are two possible directions on this line. The two possible coordinate systems which result are called ‘right-handed’ and ‘left-handed’. The standard orientation, where the xy-plane is horizontal and the z-axis points up (and the x- and the y-axis form a positively oriented two-dimensional coordinate system in the xy-plane if observed from above the xy-plane) is called right-handed or positive.