I just wanted to do some modelling in Houdini. But it took me more than an hour to just place the image plane for the front view and side view. I just found the operation of switching the views are just too complicated! e.g. I just need 3 views basically (with image planes). Then I sometimes end up with some many Left1, Left2, Persp2, Persp3, Front2……. But each of them contains different imageplane…….I found it hard to get back to my original Front1, left1, Top1 and persp1 views. Did any of you got the same feeling, or this is just my problem? sometimes, I need to zoom different portion of the view with the control drag. But after that my grid on the viewer will partly disappear. I personally found it is a lot not as user friendly as other packages.

Sorry,
I should stick on using “Control + 1”,“Control + 2”,“Control +3”,“Control + 4” to switch views. That is more stable. Instead of mixing with control +RMB to switch views.

The traditional four view model set-up is actually quite easy in Houdini.

Managing Viewports
I quickly toggle from full screen to quad views by using the spacebar-t key combo. This is the same as tapping the spacebar in sludge.
spacebar-t with cursor in one of the four quads will pop that view to full screen. I am hitting spacebar-t a lot when doing classic modelling.

Background Images
There are two ways to manage background images:

- Create physical texture mapped 4 point grids with appropriate textures
- Use the viewport background options

I use the second method. Seems every tut on the web uses the first…

I attached an asset that I use to quickly set up and manage the background images called viewport_background.

It takes no inputs. Just put it down, fetch in the images then press apply. Use the transforms to tweak the image positions in real-time. This is much faster than using the Viewport options. Make sure you spacebar-t to quad view.

I sometimes have a few of these in the object. Just press update on the one you want to use. Add a new one for each part that I am building if there are drawings for them. I just create a network box and dump them in there.

Let me know if you find this useful. If so I will put up on the Exchange.
It also needs much more work. I want to improve it to handle uv maps, create and manage multiple viewers and more.

excellent, Jeff,

I am feeling a lot better today! thanks!

bruce

Hey jeff …..
Is there a difference between using CTRL 1 , 2 , 3 etc and space 1 , 2 , 3 etc to switch between viewports why the different methods

Of note also uncheck ( use res ) under the display tab if you want a image placing in the background

R

The Ctrl-1 to Ctrl-9 are hotkyes for the different viewport layout options in the Viewport Layouts menu (viewport lower left down arrow icon).
This option only changes the layout and does not set what each port in the layout is set to.

The spacebar-1 to spacebar-5 with the cursor over a particular port will change that port to a different view type:
1 = perspective
2 = top
3 = front
4 = side
5 = uv

spacebar-t toggles between quad port view and single port view depending on what port the cursor is over.