Orient camera to surface

Anyone know why orientcameratosrf rotates the view in whatever manner it chooses? Sure, the view is perpendicular to the surface but the view is rotated 90° or whatever angle Rhino decides. Anyone know how to make it not just do whatever it wants?

have you got a file? i have no idea why it would rotate by 90° never happened to me, i assume you might have your cplane or viewport rotated and are working from there… but thats just highly speculative.

Hi Erik - it might be more predcitable/controllable with a macro using the CPlane:

_CPlane _Surface _Pause _Pause _Pause _SetView _CPlane _Top _Cplane _Undo

@ERIK_RATLIFF :

  1. nestable CPlane command > Surface option
  2. three pauses to a) select the surface, b) set the origin, c) set the rotation.
  3. nestable SetView command > Cplane option > Top option, i.e. set the view to look at the current CPlane from its ‘top’ with X to the right.
  4. CPlane command > Undo option to reset to the previous CPlane, now that the view is where we want it.

Note setting the view to CPlane Top does not force the projection - perspective cameras will keep perspective projection. To force a parallel view the simplest is to replace the SetView part of the macro with the Plan command.

_CPlane _Surface _Pause _Pause _Pause _Plan _Cplane _Undo

-Pascal

orientcamertosrf.3dm (2.0 MB)

I never mess with cplanes since i don’t really understand them well, just gets confusing for me.

Pascal’s method works though.

That works well Pascal. Can you point to a resource for learning about cplanes more?

There is this -

https://docs.mcneel.com/rhino/7/help/en-us/index.htm#commands/cplane.htm#(null)

-Pascal

Okay, the command lists can always help. I think I just need to use cplanes more and get comfortable with it. Thanks Pascal.