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Hi everyone,

I've been trying out blender lately following Guru's tutorials.

Sadly, the more I advance into any project, the more difficult it gets to move my view around (not talking about camera but simply looking at the objects I'm working on) although I don't touch anything regarding views on purpose.. I must do something wrong but I can't figure it out:

At some point, whatever the size of the object I'm trying to focus on, my view and my preset views are getting messy.

For example, each time I touch the middle click (wheel for rotation), the view focus just instantly jumps meters away before I even move. With a very small object (1 mm) I just can't manage to get near it. Numpad views 1 3 7 & 9 are not aimed at my object anymore.

Weird part is that if I start off a new project, all those view difficulties disappear.
Changing the Clip start & Clip end values, I can zoom on a 1 mm sphere easily.

I spent hours trying to fix my view & zoom problems, tried every tutorial I could find, even from a professional Jeweler working on tiny projects. YT comments didn't help either although I see many people have similar bugs with various solutions..

Quick list of what I tried to fix my problem without success:

Shift+c. Changing Units. Fly mode (won't let me use it unless in camera mode as "view offset is locked"). Setting up different view settings (focal length, clip start, end). Zoom to mouse position. "Numpad .". Auto Perspective or Depth. New hotkeys. New home brew functions. Change view lock. Lock camera to view. Zoom border. Align view. Local view. Scale down. Orthographic view.

Nothing seems to help expect starting a new blend.
The work around I use now is when I feel views are out of my control,
I copy paste the objects in a new .blend & voilà !

Frustrating that our Guru Blender seems to always have everything working smoothly.

Sad that navigating through blender's virtual space can get so damn hard.
And I can't find any working shortcuts to simply get the object properly into view or reset all the views to 0 (default).

I might have to tape out as I spend more time working around the view than 3d modeling and getting use to blender's tools.


Thanks in advance for your help & your time.

Sorry for writing too much.

Best,

Kira
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    Hello and welcome. a visual representation with screenshots and probably animated gifs could be good to better undestand the description of your issues. – Emir May 12 '21 at 16:17
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    Or provide your blend file – Chris May 12 '21 at 16:21
  • The camera has different "zoom" levels (changed by scrolling the mousewheel) which bear no relation to a change in the camera position. As the camera approaches "fully zoomed in", the rate at which the camera zooms with each mouse scroll slows down. Often working with very small objects requires you to pan the camera around the viewport manually until you find a place where the "closeup zoom" is at the right distance where small scroll (zoom) movements don't cause the camera to jump past it at large increments (a bit tricky, annoying, and unintuitive, I know). – Christopher Bennett May 12 '21 at 16:35
  • The other (a bit cheeky) option is to scale the object up by a known increment (say 10x bigger) so it's easier to work with. Then when you're done working on it, scale it back down again (applying all necessary transforms, of course). – Christopher Bennett May 12 '21 at 16:36
  • I think studying this Q&A will solve your problems: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/644/why-does-the-zoom-sometimes-stop-at-a-point – Markus von Broady May 12 '21 at 16:53
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    Have you tried selecting the component/object and pressing the "." key on your num pad? – Mark Guarini May 12 '21 at 17:00
  • Wow thank you all for such a reactive community ! I will answer you as quickly as possible. These comments are very limited in lengths although I understand why. – Kira May 13 '21 at 11:40
  • @Emir GIFs would be nice but a bit overboard: the symptoms are easy to describe. I lose control of my view overtime. Ex1: I select my object. If my project is fairly new, rotating isn't an issue. At some point if I try to rotate, the view jumps far away from the object. It's as if I'm turning around it but I can't have it in sight. Ex2: Zooming. Working on a small object. If the project is new, I can zoom in & out, no questions asked. But after a while, I simply can't zoom out & back in again to where I was seconds ago. It's seems like zooming in is suddenly maxed out too quickly. Etc. – Kira May 13 '21 at 11:55
  • @Christopher Bennett You are referring to cameras but I'm not quite there yet. I've fooled around with the tool but I was sticking to normal views for the 3d modeling. Would using the camera (ex "lock camera to view") make my life easier to move around my objects and fix some of my viewing issues ? – Kira May 13 '21 at 12:05
  • @Chris makes sens ! I don't see an option to do so. Should I do a WeTransfer and drop it in my inquiry ? – Kira May 13 '21 at 12:09
  • @Christopher Bennett the increment solution would only solve my zoom problems and I've read around that it's bad practice. Better working directly to the right scale ? – Kira May 13 '21 at 12:12
  • @Markus von Broady Great suggestion, thanks. I've read already about dolly vs zoom so I've disregarded this thread too quickly when I stumbled on it, as the main subject is zoom. There is actually much more info to grab. I will dig in right away. – Kira May 13 '21 at 12:19
  • @Mark Guarini I did. It's part of the list of fix I've tried. Shift+C didn't help neither. – Kira May 13 '21 at 12:24
  • @ALL I feel like, although it won't fix my views issues and preset views being in shambles, managing to make the FLY MODE to toggle ON would be a great work around my problems. I've already created a Shift + F hotkey but haven't succeeded yet to make it work unless I'm using the CAMERA or the project is fairly new... There is always a reason popping out why the FLY mode won't activate such as "Viewports are locked", etc.. A solution would be much appreciated. – Kira May 13 '21 at 12:35
  • I find it useful to move groups of common elements into Collections, and then I can turn off a whole Collection to clean up the screen. Another way is to select several elements to work on and Shift-H to isolate them, or an individual element and '/' key to isolate, center and zoom in ('/' again to undo the zoom and isolate). – james_t May 13 '21 at 16:51
  • You can enable the "Stored Views" add-on, where you can save various 3d Views (and name them), and even set up a camera on the current view. – james_t May 13 '21 at 16:54
  • "Frustrating that our Guru Blender seems to always have everything working smoothly." ... I'm sure Guru has a high powered workstation. Perhaps you're working with a somewhat lower quality CPU & GPU host. You might want to switch Viewport Shading to a lighter mode ("Solid") when doing lots of navigating. – james_t May 13 '21 at 16:57
  • In "View" sidepanel ('n') you can "Lock to Object" where you use the eyedrop button to select an object to center and rotate around, and then clear it to move on. – james_t May 13 '21 at 17:00
  • @james_t I do use collections and turn off some of them as I don't need them or they are getting in the way. "Stored views" Add-on (must activate via preferences) is a great suggestion, thanks ! Well.. I have a i7 with a 3070, can't get much better than this haha. But when I say smooth, I'm referring to actions Guru does that might not work for all of us as each blender has a different set-up & version. I already use "Lock to Object" with the eyedrop. Great tool but doesn't fix the view's navigation getting messy after a while – Kira May 18 '21 at 12:39
  • For a case like this .blend file or GIF with whole viewport shown still could be quite a good detail because listed problems and possible solutions should have already worked out. You can use https://pasteall.org/blend/ to upload blend and include a link here. What you explain though seems to be related to pivot point set to 3d cursor instead of e.g bounding box (or viewport camera locked to 3d cursor) – Mr Zak May 18 '21 at 12:42

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Feels like there is no point in dragging this subject on. I must say I haven't found a proper solution to reset all the views, navigation & related functions / hotkeys when they aren't responding as they should anymore.

I don't know if I'm messing up at some point, accidently touching something I shouldn't.

Anyways, the work around I've found which works pretty well is to open a new blender project and copy paste my objects from the old one to the new .blend. As I do this, views and navigation are working properly again and I can go on with 3d modeling.

Thank you all for your suggestions, much appreciated. I still learned stuff :)

Best,
Kira

Kira
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