Trying to get rendered orthographic views

I’ve tried going to the view I want to render, in this case a rear view. Then View->Viewport Render Image and I get a green screen.

I’ve also tried setting up a camera but I’m not sure that it isn’t rendering an image that doesn’t have lens distortion. I’ve tried using a relatively long 200mm lens and I get “OK” results. It also seems the camera gets moved accidentally and then I can’t get back to what I had originally.

Lock camera to view doesn’t work because I don’t have a numpad. So I used View>Align View>Align Active Camera to View and the resulting image looks like it was taken from space.

I imagine this is fairly simple to do, but I haven’t found out how to do it yet. Can anyone please help?

You can set the camera to Orthographic mode:

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Thanks but I’m not having luck.

Suppose I want to render a back view and there’s no camera in scene. I’m in the shading workspace. Go to the back view and format the shot I want. Shift+A Add Camera. Go to the camera data properties. Toggle Type to Orthographic. Then to Render>Render Image. Image comes out looking like it was taken from the other side of a very long hallway. Isn’t there a way to render what you’re looking at in your viewport and have it be orthographic?

  1. add a camera
  2. set camera to active (ctrl+numpad0)
  3. set camera to ortho
  4. align viewport to the desired angle
  5. align camera to current view (ctrl+alt+numpad0)

you might need to adjust the camera’s ortho scale level too.

Thanks for your help, but, sorry. It’s still not working. As I mentioned earlier, I have no numpad. I went in and remapped the keyboard. Everything’s the same, just anything with numpad+0 is just 0.

When I go to step #2-set camera to active (with the camera selected) there’s a dialog box that pops up and says “modifiers cannot be added to active”.
Step #3, setting camera to ortho places my camera exactly underneath my object so if I render at this point I get an empty render. And ortho scale is default at 6.0 which is why my render looks like it was taken from space. If I set that to 1.0 the camera is inside my object. Objects in the scene that are not visible are rendering too.

Maybe I need to just take a screen grab of the view I want and bring it into Photoshop, but then my images are only at screen resolution. I’m sure I’m just missing something. It can’t really be this involved to get a rendered image of the view I’m looking at. Can it?!?!

you have to position the camera appropriately. The camera is inserted whereever the 3d cursor is, and if that is inside your object, the view will be from inside your object.


it may be helpful to get the camera in place and set to active first, then move the camera until it is in the right location.

without a numpad, you can find all of those commands in the spacebar search prompt:

That did the trick. Thank you!

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