Struggling with viewport navigation?

I found today something very cool in Blender and I would like to share it. I think is very good to promote stuff like this in the community, so they become known to more users.

My rant is that something while navigating the viewport in Blender is wrong, somehow the viewport is very naughty and wants to give you pain. An example is that: imagine that you work on your human model, you are in waist area, then you navigate to the hand, this way the viewport get constantly out of focus and hence gives you one extra task all the time to set the focus of it (with period key or alt f in object mode).

So the solution for joyful and painless navigation is to enable “Auto Focus” (User Preferences > Interface > View Manipulation) and you will see totally different behavior, which is exactly what you want.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Preferences/Interface

could you make a screen shot of that “Auto Focus” function?

it seems that there is no such option available in my blender 2.71 version and an older buildbot version from n like a week ago
even in the link you have given and the images hosted there I couldn´t find a clue about this.


or is this in a newer Blender Version like in a Buildbot version, then it would be nice to know which hash or date that has.

Or do you mean something different like Auto Perspective or Auto Depth?

Yeah I think he is talking about auto Depth !

yeah that could be it :smiley:

Two more things that are helpful are the Zoom To Mouse Position, and the Rotate Around Selected. When I load a new version of Blender in, the first thing I do is change those and save it as a new default scene.

Steve S

If you don’t want to enable auto-depth, but still want to move the view to a specific area. Try Shift+B border zoom. This takes depth into account and sets the view center.

Also these may be of interest to you:

While not directly related they give some detailed info on different navigation methods.

Thanks for the responses, they were very helpful. After using “Auto Depth” for lots of days, I am either positive or negative. For example when you have density in your scene and things get in your way (such as a camera, or an empty) the rotation pivot will be set to the unwanted coordinates.

I will turn it off this week and see how it goes. In the meantime I found a very cool trick. I set the shortcut Alt + MMB for Center View To Mouse. This will replace the original ALT-F and this is only because ALT-F works wrong while in EditMode (fills faces).


Hay friends,
I have try to navigate the view-part in blender. I have try in more time to navigate but is cannot. If any body have an idea for navigating that. Please share your views about the blender view-part navigation. It is possible or not?
I hope any body to give some easy way to navigate the blender view-part. Thank in advance friends