I am a very new Blender 2.8 user (one week old) but i work more than 15 years in film production and digital VFX.
I only had a brief experience with Blender, 7 or 8 years ago, when the UI and workflow looked too alien to me and decided to skip it as a production tool until very recently. Listening to all the buzz about 2.8 i decided to give it a second try and my opinion on Blender had a complete reversal. Blender is amazing! Probably it always was but now it is intuitive and friendly for anyone not familiar with its intricacies. When the stable release is out i will definitely push for it for production work.
The reason i decided to post here was because i spent 3 days trying to figure out how to frame the camera while in Camera View. Something so simple that i can immediately do in most other 3D software i just couldnât figure out how to do in Blender. I couldnât even find the information about it in the Help files. It was frustrating and infuriating! Mostly because everything else in Blender is so well thought out in 2.8 that i could figure out immediately.
So, days later i watched an unrelated video on YouTube about Blender 2.8 and to my surprise the user opened that cryptic side menu and clicked on that Camera Lock menu! It was a revelation! But it shouldnât be like this.
For video and animation oriented professionals, camera handling is one of the most basic things that need to be immediately accessible. My suggestion is that when the user is in Camera View, the Lock Camera To View option should be immediately visible somehow and not hidden in another UI layer.
In fact neophytes find it extremely difficult to move the camera when it is framed in sight. What they find difficult is to select it to move it backwards or find the command âtarget to the objectâ, to make the camera rotate around the pointed object.
How can I give an exact size to the final rendering in layout mode, without having to go to the scene menu and change the size of the final image? , what I do now is enter camera mode, press ctrl + b and select what I want to renderize. but in doing so, what you select is rendered and the rest is transparent with the full size of the image. I hope I have explained correctly.
Perhaps it is the easiest/simplest things to implement that go unnoticed sometimes!
Camera handling is extremely important! I am actually surprised that this is a long time unaddressed request.
There is plenty of space in the current UI to add simple camera handling buttons. The âLock Camera To Viewâ should definitely be visible when Camera View (0) is selected.
There is also space for the most necessary Camera control handles:
Pan and Tilt
Track In and Track Out
Move Left, Right, Up or Down
Those should be enough for everyone to frame the camera exactly where it is needed in any given scene. Artists without a numpad or middle mouse button would also benefit from this.
There are good points made in that Task Discussion! Camera selector being one of them!
Having different buttons for Pan Up/Down, Pan Left/Right makes sense for technical reasons but the ability to pan in all directions when camera Lock is enabled should be kept as well. It is more intuitive when one frames a shot to pan in all directions until framing is satisfying.
Thanks for that. I was actually searching for this very thing earlier today!
It is funny how the camera controls are still so hidden. It is one year after this discussion started and nothing seems to be improved on this subject.
Currently the way you enable Lock Camera to View has a few flaws:
Most importantly, lack of discoverability for new users ! Since the camera doesnât move by default, new users will click on the camera icon and then not know how to move it. This is not good ! It will give newbies the impression that Blender is harder to use than it is.
Requires 3 or 4 clicks (hit N to open the side panel, click to select âViewâ, click the âLock Camera to Viewâ, hit N again to close it) instead of 1.
The N panel takes up a lot of space, so itâs annoying to have to keep opening it.
Easy to forget youâve enabled it. Every time I use Blender I find myself making unwanted camera movements and having to undo them!
Itâs a little bit poorly named, because it does move when itâs locked and it doesnât move when itâs not locked! For me, this leads to a lot of accidentally checking the box when I want it to be unchecked, or vice versa.
The obvious solution is to get rid of the hidden Lock Camera to View checkbox and replace it with a little padlock icon somewhere outside of the camera frame in Camera View, which prevents the camera from moving.
This would be more intuitive, less clicky, and easier to see at a glance whether or not youâve left it on.
2.82 has very nice new âwarningâ icons for settings that you might have forgotten that you enabled in the modeling and sculpting workspace, specifically x-mirrors, vertex merging and dyntopo.
But unfortunately, this year old suggestion was overlooked for the layout workspace. I would like to add to this that the auto-key should have a similar prominent âwarningâ icon. Actually, ideally, the âlock camera to viewâ (and âauto keyâ) warning should look something like this:
Thanks for sharing my thread. This is a big pet peeve of mine and I really hope they change it soon.
As a workaround, I recommend saving âLock Camera to Viewâ to a Quick Favourites menu so you can quickly turn it on and off by hitting Q. Itâs still pretty easy to forget when youâve enabled it, though.
I wouldnât hold it against the developers for not implementing it yet. On the whole, theyâre incredibly good at responding to user feedback, especially compared to paid software.
Agreed. I seriously doubt Iâd find this important feature if I didnât know that it was in the previous versions of Blender. It was such a relief to find out it didnât go missing. The âcryptic side menuâ description helped a lot, thank you.
I donât know what would be the best location for the option, but Iâm not sure itâs a good idea that it will be easily accessible in Viewport where you could accidentally enable it.
Yes you do.
This is related to the view, obviously it should be in the View menu, AND enabled by default.
Blender is the only app that does this weird âorbit-the-view-get-out-of-the-camera-viewâ thing.
This is related to the view, obviously it should be in the View menu, AND enabled by default.
Blender is the only app that does this weird âorbit-the-view-get-out-of-the-camera-viewâ thing.
100% agreed!
I canât even believe this is still a subject to debate about. There is no other reason to choose Camera View other than checking what the shot looks like and make adjustments if needed. What you described should be the default behavior.
Miltos, youre making great points - Im doing 3D for 23 years now and Blender, even with the huge jump with R 2.8, it`s such a messâŚ
Initially, regarding the topic of this thread, I was slightly reminded of the Nuke âlock view to cameraâ or the tick box executing the same function in Houdini - only that it is on the same drop down you select the camera with. But hell! All the other things are all over the place in Blender.
The camera properties and the render settings AND the output settings are split into separate panes - while this is useful in general, it doesn`t totally make sense for specific functions that are fed by settings in other menus and areas of the software, like depth of field. Then you have a view menu on that roll out on the right plus another one on the left. Another thing that makes my blood boil is the stupidity of some hotkeys - the function that gets rid of the nonsensical, comically gigantic default âpassepartoutâ around the cameras actual view is on the âhomeâ button while youre using the blender standard keymap. Switching to industry compatible this feature in nowhere to find. So the obvious workaround is to switch between key maps to catch this function. And btw, in the left view menu, clicking the âview allâ function actually performs what we know as âframe allâ - while this command seemingly is assigned to the âhomeâ button, too - WTF?!?!?
Really, the possibilities with Blender are amazing, but the UX is sooooo messed upâŚyuckâŚ
