Wish: Be able to lock camera height to eye-level

It is often desirable to be able to present a view from a nominal eye-level. At the moment you can set the camera Z location, but as soon as you rotate the view you wander off the setting. It would be helpful to be able to lock the Z location.

Hi @jeremy5
There is the WalkAbout command, but it leaves a LOT to be desired IMHO! If you’re looking for something a bit more “serious”, there’s @Jarek’s cool Stork plugin.
HTH, Jakob

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Hi @Normand,

Unfortunately I cannot see any way to lock camera height in WalkAbout, other than using the mouse scroll wheel which has that effect while dollying in and out - but the dolly moves very slowly while pan moves very quickly so combining them is a horror. I’ll check out Stork later - thanks for the recommendation.

Regards
Jeremy

Well, like I said: It leaves a LOT to be desired… but you can set the size of the steps/speed using pageup/pagedown and you can adjust the height with shift/RMB. But still, it’s extremely choppy!
-Jakob

I may don’t understand your request, but here walkabout works fine: it locks the z height of the camera location and you can walk around like in games with the arrows instead of wasd and look around with the mouse.
the height can be changed in the view properties (z Location, you can even put your real height, like 1800mm, which would be about the height of eyes)

Thanks @benedict, It is better if you use the arrow keys rather than the mouse to move, so thanks for that tip.

But the height is only locked if you avoid rotating the camera: if you start looking around you can tilt the view and then a sideways move changes the camera height. I guess you are locked into a plane but that plane is no longer horizontal.

Nope, not if WalkAbout is on! Turn on the camera widget (Camera Toggle) and see if the camera changes its height? It really shouldn’t. But the height/direction of the camera target changes, yes - like turning/rotating your head. Is it the camera target you are looking to lock to a specific Z-height?
-Jakob

Check out the camera height changing during WalkAbout in this:

And note the Camera Rotation setting - set this back to zero and then the height won’t change - but using the mouse to look around can adjust the rotation off the zero setting (which is how I got it like this for the video).

But listen, thanks for the original suggestion: I am not aiming to create flythru’s so, notwithstanding the quirks, it is probably good enough to make occasional view setting a bit easier.

Regards
Jeremy

hey again, I’m not at my office, so it’s just a shot in the dark: which rotation mode are you using? I remember this all working perfectly fine for me, so we might have a different setting there?

B

Hi Ben,

I’m using the Classic V2 style rotate relative to view. I just tried Rotate relative to view and it was harder to tilt the camera, but unfortunately I managed it in the end. Thereafter the camera height changed as I moved sideways.

Regards
Jeremy

Hi @jeremy5
Strange indeed, although I can see why the rotated camera will change the height, as the camera slides left/right. I’m OoO as well, but I stand corrected. I’m not quite sure how looking around tilts your view - maybe ctrl or shift in combination with RMB?
-Jakob

@jeremy5

well, i was able to reproduce the height changing by using the classic v2 style. once your “walking plane” is not parallel to the world axis, you’ll have height change by making “side steps”

if you choose the “around world axis” and set back the view (and mostly to set your own view axis parallel to the world axis) with “4 default view” or similar command, the height stays exactly the same.

oh, and if you change too often the rotation style while in walkAbout mode, rhino crashes.

i hope this helps

B

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Good thinking/catch @benedict! I think we can all agree, that walkabout could do with some TLC for V8. I just tried getting the Z value to change with Rotate Around World Axis - no luck… wait… I think I found it… hold RMB and then LMB will let you drag the view (and thus change the Z value!)… Never knew that :grimacing:
-Jakob

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