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Jun
20

Blender 2.5 Featured Feature: “Animated View Switch”

Posted by BrianH on June 20th, 2009 at 12:00 am

animated_view

Edit: It’s been brought to my attention that the animated viewport switching is actually in the 2.49 release.  You can find it under User Preferences > View and Controls > “Smooth View”.  I guess I never really noticed this until the 2.5 UI enabled it by default.  I’ve been using Blender for the past 6 years and I still learn something new every day.

Something I didn’t notice right away until I started doing some modeling in 2.5 is the animated viewport switching.  When switching in a 3D View in both Orthographic and Perspective, using the Number Pad 0, 1, 3, and 7 keys, the viewport is actually animated.  It doesn’t matter what view angle you’re at either.  The animation effect will move from any User view angle, even from a Camera view.  This will be very helpful, especially for beginners, to understand where you are in relation to your scene and/or model.  It’s great to see a lot of work is being done like this to help the user learn and understand 3D space and the application itself.

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7 Responses to Blender 2.5 Featured Feature: “Animated View Switch”

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  2. oogsnoepje |

    June 20, 2009 at 1:51 am

    Yeah, it’s a great feature, I like it as well :) It’s not just handy for beginners, after all those years I’m still confused when there’s no view camera animation!

    Anyway, it’s not a 2.5-feature, it was already available in Blender 2.4x. Try to set “Smooth View” to 1000 (ms) under the “View & Controls” section of the preferences ;)

  4. Nathan Letwory |

    June 20, 2009 at 2:46 am

    Hi,

    this feature has existed already for some versions in the 2.4x series too. In the user prefs View & Controls section set Smooth View to something larger than 0. IIRC these are milliseconds.

  5. gustapo |

    June 20, 2009 at 3:24 am

    It’s actually not a new feature, it have been in blender for ages. (Preferences -> and set ‘smooth view’ to value bigger than zero)

  6. BrianH |

    June 20, 2009 at 5:43 am

    Woops, I guess I never noticed that before. Good to see my readers keeping me on track. :) I’ll edit the article later tonight.