I’m trying to figure out one of the odder design choices in Blender, and trying to determine if there is a logical reason for it.
Imagine you have a model of something like a car. If you go to the front, back, top, or bottom views, you are looking toward that part of the car (assume it’s oriented that way for now.)
But when you look from the right or left views, you are viewing away from the right and left sides of the car, instead.
Why were the views set up this way? Is there a useful reason for this?
Or is this more of a cultural artifact of the way left and right are defined?
I suppose it’s a matter of perspective (point of view, not optically speaking).
If you have a model that is facing you and you want to switch to the left view, are you expecting the model’s left side, or YOUR left side. I’d guess various people would find one more intuitive over the other.
Well the thing is you are working on an object. In case of a car it’s pretty clear where the front, rear and therefore left right are. Now think of a sphere. Not so obvious anymore. Anyway, you can think of it like going around the object in a circle. From the front you shift the camera to the left, then to the back, one step further is the right and then you come back to the front.
There’s no design choice that says you must have perspectives flipped. When you model something, the objects left and right are aligned however you want them to be. You wouldn’t notice it doesn’t match the direction it says in the view port unless you paid careful attention to that.
I noticed that if you align the model to face positive Y, then it will face toward that view unless you look at it from the front or back:
Since no matter how you have it aligned one pair of directions is reversed, it’s probably just an unreported bug. I remember a few years ago an outside developer fixed an issue where trackball rotation had a stair-step sort of interpolation, and that was a feature that was used in blender for a long time without anyone noticing.
Right-click select wasn’t any sort of cultural artifact. You don’t use the right mouse button to do everything the left button does in right-click select. It’s just assigning selection to a button that is different from what you use to manipulate widgets so you won’t accidentally grab them when you are trying to select something near them. It also makes teak select to move easier to use since you don’t have to select that specific tool.
Well anyway, I’m saying that those sort of non-standard things in blender do have reasoning behind them. They aren’t the result of cultural differences or mistranslations or whatever.
You build this little mental ‘glass house’ around your model when you looking at front view imagine yourself self looking through the glass window named front, when you are looking at the right view imagine yourself looking through the glass window named right etc…Google orthographic projection for further reading
edit
It can be a little confusing to get but remember left and right is from the viewer/camera’s left and right because that is the station point you use to construct your projection from whether it is orthographic projection or in perspective projection
Interestingly enough, now that you mentioned it. If I where to start modelling a car I would most likely start to model in front view but begin building my model from the side. Does that make sense? So somehow I automatically ( intuitively) am thinking in world space about my camera/ viewport orientation. The object itself doesn’t really matter in my mind.
Now I don’t know where @Rekov is from, but might this be some cultural thing like different parts of the world do start reading from different sides? Might be interesting in terms of general UI/UX design.
Ok, that does make sense. I suppose I should have thought of the scene from the camera’s point of view instead of the object’s point of view. A more accurate gif would be something like this:
Yea, I know I didn’t need to make a gif to illustrate this, but I made a cube to help visualize it, then I got a bit side tracked playing with shaders, so I decided to keep that time from going to waste and made one.
Just editing this out because you are right from the drafting perspective. But the confusion I think may also be added by the below information.
I believe that the confusion comes from Blender’s “left hand” rather than “right handed” co-rdinate system.
Normally and pretty much accepted industry practice as long as I have been around (27+ years associated with 3D apps), you point the asset down the positive Z or in Blender’s case Y.
However if you do that, when you export to another program, you wind up with an asset pointed down the negative Z.
