Zoom To Mouse Position + Auto Depth

Hi.

I would like to gather some opinions from users who use these two options and especially from those who (sometimes) dont. (You can change it in “preferences” under “navigation”)

Since my time with Blender (2.5-2.79) I worked exclusively with both of them enabled and more or less forgot about the settings, because there wasnt really a benefit for myself in not using them. Currently these settings are disabled by default in 2.8 beta. For testing I decided to not use my previous preferences and tried to went on with Blenders standard:

My impression is that controlling like that is very uncomfortable, since you have to adjust the 3D view a lot more. As a new user to 2.80 I quickly felt lost because you basically scroll and rotate around an empty space with invisible boundaries.

For example, it meant to me that scrolling to a specific position requires to center the desired location somewhere in the middle of the screen. I guess where this might be, move the view and readjust as I get closer, because its not easy to be precise.
In contrary, this isnt necessary with Zoom To Mouse Position. My mouse points where I want to go, and I often dont even need to use the keyboard while overviewing a small scene.

Experimenting further, an issue was that sometimes the Zoom just slows down and wont go any closer. The view is almost locked and I cant even move it either. What happened? I cant certainly say it because there is no visible feedback.
Its not clear to someone who starts with Blender like that. Auto-Depth solved it immediately, but its not something a new user knows about.

I know it can be discouraging to encounter these kind of issues while making first steps. This of course is my personal experience influenced by habit, but I think these problems are very easy to stumble over regardless.
What do you think and whats your setting right now?

In my opinion these two settings “Auto Depth” and “Zoom To Mouse Position” should be enabled by default. Currently I cant see why working without them would be superiour. The tooltip for Auto Depth even states “improves pan/rotate/zoom functionality”.

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Yeah… I remember requesting this to be default as well, but no luck…
This is actually how most DCC apps works by default, not sure why it’s different in Blender…

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I don’t know what the rules about resurrecting the old topics are around here, but when I tried creating a new topic about this, the forum suggested this topic instead. @karja described the issue better than I ever could, the issue stays relevant to this day, so I thought I might as well bump this instead.

I have a few points to add about why these options should be enabled by default and would love to hear some rationale behind why they’re disabled.

  • I’m a moderator at the Russian community and we constantly have new people asking how to deal with the issue when Blender suddenly stops zooming in or panning. I’s incredibly easy to get into this state by just zooming in towards an object while it’s not in the center of the viewport. The correct answer to fixing this is enabling Auto depth. What is the rationale of having this disabled by default if even the tooltip says it improves the viewport behavior?
  • The zoom to cursor position is an excellent way of navigating the scene. Just zoom out, point your mouse pointer at an object or part of an object, zoom in, you’re there. It’s simple, fast and intuitive.
  • The default behavior of zooming in towards the center of the viewport could work if we had a crosshair there (like in the FPS Shift + ~ mode) and didn’t have to eyeball it when trying to zoom in to a specific part of the scene or model. And even then it would be less convenient than just zooming in towards the mouse pointer because you would have to pan your view a lot to center the object in it.
  • The Zoom to Mouse Position option has an extra undocumented feature. It also enables orbiting around mouse position, which makes it incredibly easy to orbit around whatever you’re currently working with. Its so much better than either the Orbit around selection option (even the official Blender manual says that it sounds cool, but it’s not), or the default behavior of orbiting around a completely arbitrary point in space.
  • To a new user, if a good feature is not enabled by default, it does not exist. The GPU rendering being off by default results in posts on Reddit “Hey, check out my donut, only took me 9 hours to render on my RTX 2080Ti!”. Node Wrangler being disabled results in each and every last Blender to tutorial on YouTube having to waste time explaining over and over again how to enable it. Having the Auto Depth and Zoom to Mouse disabled results in new users feeling that Blender’s viewport is not responsive and is a pain to navigate.

Those are good features, they deserve being on by default.

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I’m 50/50 on zooming to mouse position. Sometimes I like it and sometimes I don’t.

Auto Depth, on the other hand, I am 100% behind. This should be on by default.

Sorry to revive this topic again.
The zoom to mouse position doesn’t work no matter what settings I change, Incredibly
frustrating. No one seems to have the answer,
Windows 8 with 16 ram

That’s weird. What’s your blender version? What happens when you scroll? Are you sure it’s enabled?