New to blender, a veteran in many other VFX packages. I hope this post will help other people new to blender. This is an issue I’ve been having and haven’t found a clear answer anywhere else.
LOST PERSPECTIVE CAMERA!
While viewing my scene, sometimes I will click and almost arbitrarily, my perspective camera will yeet off to some known place and my scene is now completely lost. I have tried hitting " . " to center on a object. Nothing. It just doesn’t work. At all.
If I AM able to find my scene it is far away. Great! I can just mouse wheel towards it. Nope! The closer I get the slower I approach the object until the viewport will not move further AT ALL. This is absolutely maddening.
I need a definitive simple way to just center my perspective camera on an object. This is a simple keystroke in Unity, Unreal, everything else. Please help me!
WHY does the perspective camera behave as described above, slowing as it approaches the approaches at object until it refuses to move at all .
Is there a way to just reset the perspective a camera to a default state.
When viewing through a camera, is there a way to jump the perspective camera to that point and then switch to the perspective camera. This is something you can do in Unreal and it’s super helpful.
This has halted work on a number of my sessions and it seems like a needless hitch. Either there is I am missing or this is a very strange omission. Please help and thank you!
I have frame selected (from the view dropdown) set in my quick favourites (q on keyboard). If I ever lose scene I select an object from the outliner window, hit q then frame selected. This will zoom to and centre that object, if you select all or multiple it will find a median point to view from.
If you are in camera view mode then the same thing applies and the camera will move to that perspective and world position. This is assuming you have move camera to view checked in the viewport n panel, under view.
Also I use Stored views (I think it’s a built-in add on) lets you easily access different cameras and 1 click to add a camera from the current view.
You can add constraints (next to the modifiers tab) such as track to, the camera will then track to an objects origin point.
Let’s start with : I don’t know what you’re talking about, in every occurrence of the phrase “the perspective camera”.
Blender offers a Camera View, which is obviously the view that a Camera object sees. When not using that, you’re in Perspective View and there’s no camera associated with it.
If you are viewing through the camera all the time then you need to turn on lock camera to view in the 3D windows side panel. Or stop looking through the camera needlessly.
If you get stuck, press 5 on the numpad and go into orthographic view. then you never stick and can zoom in close on anything. Yes - orthographic perspective view is a thing.
View Menu > Navigation > Walk Navigation has a teleport to the mesh under the cursor. Far to tedious to use - even with adding walk to the quick favorite menu…
I often use Shift-B to zoom. The size and location of the box you drag out is where the view moves too.
Are you using a non standard keymap? Have you mis adjusted either or both the side panel start and end clipping in the view tab. Or done the same in the cameras settings.
Have you got the view locked to something in the side panel settings?
Your problems sound like about version 3.6… 3.8. AKA not occurring any more if you use the latest version. Very odd. I have not had those issues for several years.
If you are on a Mac, that may be the issue. Add ‘using Mac’ or similar to the thread title to get a fellow mac users attention. Some driver tweaking may be needed.
And yes - I have no idea what exactly a perspective camera means to you.
If images will help show your problem then drop a link to images elsewhere if you want to get beyond the 1 image only limit for new members.
“.” does center on an object, but you must make sure you have only the one object you intend to center on selected.
You can try selecting a single object in the outliner, this will make “.” much more effective than doing it with all objects selected.
Once you have re-centered on 1 specific object, the zoom will be reset and its speed adjusted to the scale of the object. If you need to zoom on a specific part of the mesh, go into edit mode and re-center on 1 vertex. That way of working is pretty standard across 3D software, so I suppose there must be some detail about Blender’s interface you missed.
The way Blender’s zoom works by default, you can’t actually get past your center point by using the mouse wheel. Some 3D software do allow it, but it moves the point of focus to a spot you didn’t precisely choose. Both ways have their advantages and disadvantages.
You might want to try these options in the preferences:
If you want to actually move around in Blender, you might also try “view navigation” mode (you will have to look up the shortcut, we likely don’t have the same keyboard type), it allows you to move around with very similar controls to Unreal. Just be warned that this mode doesn’t center you on any object, so you will still need to re-center manually on anything you want to edit.
By default, if you are inside of a camera in Blender and you try rotating the viewport, you will be ejected from the camera and placed in its exact spot. If this doesn’t happen, you probably have activated lock camera to view.
Oh, and just as other people have said, Blender doesn’t treat perspective view (the basic viewport view) as a camera object. You won’t be able to find any camera that is used for the default viewport, in the scene or in the outliner.
As far as i understood this… you are talking of the perspective view… (?)
View → Frame All or select object and View → Frame selectednumpad .
IDK what you have done but maybe look at the other numbers…
What should be a default for a camera ?? (or do you mean perspective view?? → front, back, side, top down… by Numpad… numbers)
When viewing through a camera…then the view is the view of the camera… or do you mean View → Camera → Active Camera (view)… Numpad 0 or View → Align View → Align Active Camera To ViewCtrl-Alt Numpad 0
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