When working in Blender we are going to be moving the camera quite a bit. The main way of doing this is to center the view on an object or on the scene. So how do we center our view on something in Blender?
To Center our view on an object in Blender
To center the view on the scene in Blender
In the rest of this article we'll go into a few common options we'll use for moving our camera. We'll also go over how to make these more convenient either through the quick favorite menu or by rebinding the shortcut.
To focus on objects without a numpad:
We may also just want to change the shortcut of frame selected if we don't have a numpad or if the shortcut is just inconvenient.
To change the shortcut go back to View > Frame Selected and right click on it. Click on change shortcut and then we can just enter the new shortcut we want to use. We can also access the key binding by going to Edit > Preferences > Keymap. In Search type Frame Selected.
Setting the binding through Preferences gives us more options for configuring the shortcut. For example we could set it to the mouse or a text input. We can also clear the shortcut if we've set it to something we don't want.
We may also be running into conflicts with our shortcut and we can easily find out what shortcut is conflicting with ours by changing the search to binding and entering our shortcut in the search field.
To toggle orthographic view go to View > Perspective / Orthographic.
Orthographic view removes all perspective from the view and can help us when we're modeling. Perspective might hide imperfections in our model or give us an inaccurate view of how our models curves look.
We can also still access the top, down, left, and right perspectives without a numpad. To do this go to View > Viewport and clicking on the perspective we want.
We can also rebind all of these or add them to quick favorite. To do this go to the option you want to rebind in the view dropdown and then right click on it and either select add to quick favorite or click Change shortcut.
When we add something to Quick favorite we can access it by just pressing Q and select it in the dropdown menu.
We can also access more advanced shortcut configuration options by going to Edit > Preferences > Keymap and searching for the option we want to rebind.
To align camera to view without a Numpad go to View > Align View > Align Active Camera to View.
Aligning camera to view can make it very easy for us to get our camera to be exactly where we want it to be rather that have to manually trying to adjust it to be exactly where we want it to be.
One issue we may run into with this option is if we have multiple cameras in our scene. Only the active camera will be centered even if it's disabled for render and not selected. To change the active camera go to the Properties Panel > Scene Properties > Camera and select the camera you want to be active.
To enter and exit local view:
Local view is useful when we have a very cluttered scene or just a scene with a lot of objects that to tend to get in the way of each other.
When we go into local view all other objects but the selected objects will become invisible. The best way to tell if we're in local view is if there's objects in the scene that aren't hidden in the hierarchy but we can't see them in the 3D view.
We can also remove objects from local view. To do this for select the object you want to remove. Go to View > Local View > Remove from Local View.
If we ever accidently end up in local view and wonder why all the other objects have disappeared we can just go back to the view options and toggle local view and this should bring all the objects back.
Sometimes in Blender we'll have a very complex hierarchy with a lot of objects. We may want to find this object in the hierarchy for organization purposes or to adjust the object.
The quickest way to find these objects in hierarchy view is to select the object in the 3D viewport and then just press the period key. (not the numpad period)
We can also find and object without even having to use the 3D viewport if we know the name of the object. We can just use the Search function and then select the object in the hierarchy then we can clear out the search field and press the period key to jump to the object in the scene hierarchy.
Knowing these common shortcuts for the view and hierarchy can speed up or work in Blender quite a bit and just make Blender easier to work with. Some devices don't have a numpad so we'll have to rebind this and with the options above we should be able to make it just as convenient.
Finding an object in the hierarchy can quickly become inconvenient in more complex scenes. Knowing how to quickly jump to objects can save us a lot of time and help us better manage our scenes.
Thank you for your time.
