How to make camera see what I see?

Support Basics & Interface
1

My model looks good in perspective mode, but when I press F12 it is horribly warped.

What camera settings should I use to simply see what I usually see while modeling?

Also, where is the “Lock to Camera View” button? I can read all about it, but so far my googleFU has not located it!

Thanks!

2

Also, where is the “Lock to Camera View” button? I can read all about it, but so far my googleFU has not located it!

Press N for the properties panel and look under ‘View’ for the checkbox

3

UPDATE: although I found “Lock Camera View,” it does not work. I move my viewpoint around, and F12 still renders a different view. I thought it did work once, but it has not worked since then. And my renders still don’t look anything like they do when I edit.

4

Camera view, lock camera to view in blender 2.63. Works perfectly for me.
What do you mean by renders a different view ? Have you set another object to be the render camera ? You can see the selected render camera in the Scene settings. Post a link to your blend file.

5

Lock Camera View works fine for me as well in 2.63. Remember to go to Camera View by pressing 0 on the numpad. Then when you navigate your scene your camera will follow.

6

You can also create a split window and have edit mode on one side and camera view (press 0) on the other, then you can move the camera manually in the edit window and see the results in the camera view window.

7

Most useful for what you describe is probably ctrl+alt+0, which aligns the active camera to your current “free view”.
Related trick: you can actually activate any object as “active camera” with ctrl+0, and move it around with Lock Camera to View.
Sometimes monkeying around with viewpoints messes up the free-view Lens-setting… this can be corrected in N-panel->view->Lens.

8

When this works for everyone else but me, I know it is just me, climbing the learning curve.
Thanks for all the replies trying to smarten me up.

Instead of using my 15MByte problem file, I added a cone to the initial cube:


You can see “Lock Camera to View” is selected
Here is how it renders:


It has rendered from a completely different point of view. How is this possible?
Unfortunately, this file does not show the extreme distortion the other file has.

Any idea how I could have decoupled these?

Thanks!

9

Do the following steps:

  1. Go to Camera View by pressing 0 on the numpad.
  2. Check the box “Lock Camera to View”
  3. Stay in Camera View but now when you navigate the scene (i.e. using middle click to rotate) it won’t break out into “User Persp” but will stay in “Camera Persp”
10

Thanks! I expected the camera to stay locked on user perspective as I changed the user perspective. If I stay in the Camera Perspective, it works just as you say.

Now I will chase down the distortions…

11

I have the same problem. The moderator didn’t seem to understand the issue. I need to have the PERSPECTIVE view in the camera view. My view is fine, but when I “0” to the camera view it goes back to orthographic.

I finally found the answer here: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/42511/how-do-i-make-front-ortho-the-active-camera

12

It took you 7 years to find the solution, this was a small step for you but big step for the humanity, but why not even go further with your solution and use even a better solution?

13

No, it took me about 5 minutes. I just replied to an old post. Is there a problem with doing that? Anyway, thanks for the link.

14

If i understand your request.
U should Pres 0 (Numpad)
Then pres " N " / there chose “View” / then “View Lock” / then click “Camera to View”