Fullscreen camera viewpoint on second monitor?

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

Hi folks,

I’m thinking about using Blender for photography, whereby i want to send a camera viewpoint to a projector for special lighting effects in my photographic studio.

Although i want to use a projector, the principal is exactly the same if i was using a second monitor, so hereafter i’ll only discuss monitors, nor projectors.

Of course it’s easy enough to view my Blender camera viewpoint on a second monitor, but the problem is i have OS (windowing) and Blender interface elements showing, which ruins the effect.

Does anyone know if there’s a way to bring up your camera viewpoint on a second monitor, and hide all interface and app elements? So imagine my camera is just looking at a red emissive sphere with no lights in the scene. Then i want to see only this on my 2nd monitor…so, no window frame, no Blender widgets, menus or other interface elements.

I’ve been googling it for half an hour and an coming to the conclusion that it might not be possible, so i’m throwing it out to the great and the good here, hoping someone has a tip, workaround or hack for me!

2

If you hide the UI as much as possible, it will look like the image below.

ts.blend (1.1 MB)

sdas
sdas1920×1080 68.1 KB

For the rest, try zooming in on the screen.
You’ve probably seen the screen zoomed in during school. :thinking:

3

After disabling UI elements hit ctrl-alt-spacebar.

4

You could also use OBS studio to crop out a portion of a window and send that to a projector.

5

Thanks for the ideas!

I tried the magnifier, that works pretty good (115% does it). But i’m wondering if you can magnify only one monitor? I’ll try it later this evening and find out.

OBS sounds interesting. So can you tell OBS to output what it’s “recording” on a particular monitor?

6

There used to be builds that had a button to run Blender “Windowless” but I’m not sure if there are any currently.
I read through a bunch of the comments that the developers made, many years ago, regarding those builds and they referred to the windowless button as the “YES, I AM STUPID BUTTON”.
It was very problematic and it often resulted in the program crashing.

7

sure thing, you can setup a ‘scene’ in obs that includes a window or monitor input, which you can crop/adjust as needed:

image
image4256×1440 781 KB

then you can project that scene to an output device of your choosing:
image

8

It works perfectly. :slightly_smiling_face: :+1:

vls
vls1920×1047 219 KB

sds
sds1920×1080 124 KB

9

Hi, I’ve managed to get a perfect fullscreen 3D viewport on a second monitor! I use this to perform with live generated projections that I control from a different monitor.

  1. Window -> New Main Window This will be the fullscreen window, so drag it to the monitor you want it on.
  2. Window -> Toggle Window Fullscreen
  3. In the 3D Viewport area, Ctrl+Alt+Space Toggle Maximize Area, this also hides all the toolbars and stuff.
  4. Shift+Alt+Z hide overlays
  5. Numpad 0 Go to camera view
  6. Space (search) -> Frame Camera Bounds The shortcut for this is Home but that doesn’t work on my machine for some reason, so I have to search for the command.

There it is!