When I create a new blender file, the behaviors of the top, front and right views in the 3d window (accessed via numpad-7, numpad-1, numpad-3) is just as I would expect them to be. As I tried various tutorials, I found that top, front and right views would change. I found that zooming would affect all views, but this is easy to reset by View, View Navigation, Reset Zoom.
If I select one of the standard views, top, front or right and then rotate (via numpad-2, 4, 6 or 8), the standard view remains the same. If I instead select then pan (Ctl-numpad-2,4,6 or 8), the change to the standard view persists. This seems to apply both to orthographic and to perspective views.
Is there a way to restore the default settings for standard views?
Is there a way to set the viewport’s coordinates by typing them in, as you can set an object’s coordinates by changing its transform coordinates?
Even if there isn’t a way of changing the viewport’s coordinates, is there a way to know where the viewport is, in the same way that one knows where a camera is?
All the documentation I have found has been either too brief (of the “here’s a 10 second introduction to blender” kind) or too scattershot (of the “here’s a really neat but specific trick” sort), so I would really appreciate hearing of any that is detailed and systematic. Nothing I’ve seen so far mentions that the standard viewport settings can change as I’ve described.
Shift+C will center the cursor on the grid and will center the view on the cursor, thus undoing any viewport changes done with panning.
Documentation is Blender’s achilles heel, but the wikiis pretty good. The release notes are good for new features before there are any decent wiki articles or tutorials. I’d stay away from the Noob to Pro wikibook, it had great intentions but the execution is spotty. The Users Manual is good, the Blender Summer of Documentation is very good, but some of the projects are incomplete.
To add to the above, after you “shift c” hitting c will center the view to the cursor and get you back to the default ortho view as far as panning goes. Not sure about zoom.
I agree the manual is pretty good. I’ve read just about the whole thing, save for a few sections not of my interest at this time.
You can navigate from here to other parts you might want to take a look at.
If I want an answer I will google it and look for the entries from Blender.org Usually a manual section will come up and I find it a good way to search. 9 out of 10 I have my answer.
Thank you. I saw Shift+c, but it places the view ports on the center of all the objects. If you’ve scattered objects about willy-nilly like I did, the center of the objects is not the origin.
“c” is more to the point. That reduces the problem to moving the 3-d cursor to the origin, and that is trivial. Under View, View Properties, set the 3-d cursor position to 0, 0, 0. Then press “c” to recenter the standard views.
As a noob, it’s very easy for me to become disoriented in space. I needed a way to restore my standard views to a known position. The discovery that I could center the standard views at least gives me an escape when I become totally lost.
The sheer quantity of documentation is both a blessing and a curse. Because there’s so much, it was easy to find documentation that was somehow related, but hard to find the way to do X, where X is some specific action, like recenter the standard views. I had spent quite some time with various documentation trying to see one particular tree in the forest.
It also doesn’t help that the top, front and right views don’t have some descriptive name for the group, and I was forced to make up the name “standard views.” Or perhaps they do have a name as a group, and I have missed that as well
