Hey everybody,

I just made a video asking the question: How do you navigate (more specifically pan the camera) in large environments without the camera flying away?

It's much easier to see it in action:
https://vimeo.com/892023038/f7c23089f0?share=copy [vimeo.com]

I'm not sure if there is a way around this. I've always just struggle bussed it by re-framing to my small object a million times as I'm working, but if you know of a better way, I'd love to hear about it.


Have a great day,

- Tyler

Hold the space bar while hovering over the viewport. You'll see a new set of buttons just above the viewport. The left-most one will be "set pivot on tumble rotate". Try changing that to "keep pivot on tumble rotate".

Is that the behavior you are looking for?

There's also first-person navigation mode, which you can enter with Space+M. It takes over the hotkeys in the viewport, but allows you to use the mouse and the standard WASD keys to move around. This works well for large scenes that you need to get in close to, where rotating around a pivot tends to send you "inside" objects or zipping off on a large arc.

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/basics/view.html#fps [www.sidefx.com]

BradThompson
Hold the space bar while hovering over the viewport. You'll see a new set of buttons just above the viewport. The left-most one will be "set pivot on tumble rotate". Try changing that to "keep pivot on tumble rotate".

Is that the behavior you are looking for?

It's close! That works well for tumbling, but if you hold down middle mouse and pan while the cursor is hovering over the mountains in the back, then it will zoom away.

malexander
There's also first-person navigation mode, which you can enter with Space+M. It takes over the hotkeys in the viewport, but allows you to use the mouse and the standard WASD keys to move around. This works well for large scenes that you need to get in close to, where rotating around a pivot tends to send you "inside" objects or zipping off on a large arc.

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/basics/view.html#fps [www.sidefx.com]

Hey, thanks for the reply malexander,

Unfortunately the first-person mode does not work well either. The speed at which it navigates is still based on the 16,000 meter object in the scene, so it zooms off quickly.

tbay312

malexander
There's also first-person navigation mode, which you can enter with Space+M. It takes over the hotkeys in the viewport, but allows you to use the mouse and the standard WASD keys to move around. This works well for large scenes that you need to get in close to, where rotating around a pivot tends to send you "inside" objects or zipping off on a large arc.

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/basics/view.html#fps [www.sidefx.com]

Hey, thanks for the reply malexander,

Unfortunately the first-person mode does not work well either. The speed at which it navigates is still based on the 16,000 meter object in the scene, so it zooms off quickly.

You can adjust the speed with the mouse wheel, or by holding Ctrl/Shift. It's hard to know exactly how fast someone wants to zip around the scene, so it only makes a best guess.

tbay312
It's close! That works well for tumbling, but if you hold down middle mouse and pan while the cursor is hovering over the mountains in the back, then it will zoom away.

The only way to set the pan speed is to home in on a small object or selection. The pan speed is set when homing based on the bounds of the object, but it's also modified by a raycast when panning, it doesn't get it back down from astronomical speeds though.

malexander

tbay312

malexander
There's also first-person navigation mode, which you can enter with Space+M. It takes over the hotkeys in the viewport, but allows you to use the mouse and the standard WASD keys to move around. This works well for large scenes that you need to get in close to, where rotating around a pivot tends to send you "inside" objects or zipping off on a large arc.

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/basics/view.html#fps [www.sidefx.com]

Hey, thanks for the reply malexander,

Unfortunately the first-person mode does not work well either. The speed at which it navigates is still based on the 16,000 meter object in the scene, so it zooms off quickly.

You can adjust the speed with the mouse wheel, or by holding Ctrl/Shift. It's hard to know exactly how fast someone wants to zip around the scene, so it only makes a best guess.

Awesome! That's worked the best so far. Thank you for the tip on that.

If I may add a couple of constructive ideas - I think it would be an improvement to allow for the left mouse to control the camera direction when moving in 1st person mode. At the moment, that doesn't work.

And secondly, I think it would make sense to fix the panning issue by turning off the green "selectable" flag on the obj level and making those objects invisible to ray-traced cursor operations.

Thank you for the help,

Have a nice day,

- Tyler

Double-clicking on geometry in the viewport will zoom into that, and also adjust the navigation speeds accordingly.