sorry for the ambiguous title, what I want is this, when you start modelling an object you most likely model it in front view (meaning the object sits facing front), later on you might move it around and transform, for now if I want to maintain this view so it’s easier to model, I alt+d to duplicate it while keeping the original model in a separate layer so I can always go back to modify the original model (another way is to keep it in a separate blend file and link it), but I always wonder is there a more efficient way to do so, for example, it would be ideal to press ‘/’ (in real blender it just isolates the model) to enter this front up view to model on and press ‘/’ to go back to normal view.
You can align view to face normal (shortcut shift+numpad 7 or add ctrl to align to the opposite side of normal) and model in place. In there you just use / to isolate and you can use named transform orientation(ctrl+alt+spacebar). This way it’s possible to work on surfaces which are not aligned to any view.
You can create a Camera object and use the hotkey to go into its view and back. I think it’s Ctrl + Insert first to set the camera as active and Insert to toggle going in or out.
The camera stays in place, you can assign background images to it etc. It’s great.
thanks for the replies, but none of these are intuitive to use, are there any addons for this? I suppose its not hard to implement since you only need to reset the transform temporarily (without you applying the transform at any point though especially the rotate).
Not intuitive? I’m going to assume you didn’t try it out…
This is me just pressing Insert to toggle between Perspective and Camera-Perspective views:
- You can navigate in the camera view with Ctrl + Shift + F or by selecting the camera and pressing G (while in that same view). You can change the transf. orientation to Local to be able to press Z, Z and make the camera dolly front and back in whatever direction it’s facing.
- You can orbit with the camera while watching through it by selecting the camera, placing the 3D cursor on a point of interest and changing pivot mode to “Cursor”, then press R, R to enter trackball mode or press the other axis constraint keys.
somehow when I press insert or ctrl+insert, nothing really happened, so I can’t really follow this, nor that I have a clear idea how your method works I have to look into it.
Ah, it’s actually Ctrl + Numpad 0, the default keymap for “Set Active Object as Camera” (view3d.object_as_camera).
You use it after selecting a camera.
This command can also be used to look through something like a Lamp object, to visually aim it at the subject(s) to be lit.
Maybe worth checking Stored Views