Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2010/08/23/noob-to-pro-navigation-tip-to-keep-3d-window-centred/

pretty new Blender menu

I have been using Blender off and on for a couple of years now and one thing always bugged me. When I rotate a model this way and that in the 3D editing window, to get a better view when I’m fixing stuff, (right now I’m replacing all my triangles with quads for example), sometimes the model stays nice and centred while I rotate around it, but sometimes it jumps about like a jack in the box, but why?

All is explained here - Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Navigation in 3D – Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks. Apparently the model is rotating just like it should, but the centre of rotation has gotten a little lost.It’s easy to fix from the view menu in the 3D window though.

Unfortunately the short cut involves using the “.” button on the number pad. As I’m using a laptop and it doesn’t even have a number pad this isn’t going to be possible, and the huge number of times I find myself resetting the centre of rotation for the 3D window now that I know how to do it really demands that I use the short cut.

Luckily short cuts are customisable in Blender, here’s an explanation of how to customise the interface short cuts. I switched off the circle select short cut “c” and replaced the “.” short cut for centre view to cursor with the newly freed up “c”as you can see in the screen grab above. It took a while to find hidden among the huge list of short cut options in the preferences window but now that I’ve got it changed it’s made me very happy. I’ve already used it like a bajillion times.