Wish: "Zoom selected half-way" and "True zoom"

[Rhino_Bulgaria (Bobi)]

Wish 1: I often use the “Zoom selected” and it does a decent job, however, I would like to be able to zoom half-way (maybe an alternative command called “Zoom selected half-way”?) so that the selection will not fill the entire viewport. Imagine activating “Zoom selected” and then zoom-out with the mouse wheel once. This is how I think the “Zoom selected half-way” should render the objects in a bit more distant fashion compared to the default “Zoom selected”.

Or, maybe if the developers decide to add a new Rhino option called “Safe frame” whose customizable size determines a square or a rectangle area that will be used by Rhino to zoom the selection in the active viewport. For example, a “Safe frame” of 50% means that the manimum zoom of the selection upon running “Zoom selected” will be half the size of the active viewport.

Current “Zoom selected” (or an alternative “Safe frame” option set to 100%):

New “Zoom selected half-way” (or an alternative “Safe frame” option set to 75%):

---

Wish 2: The “Zoom selected” command probably uses the bounding box of the selection to fit the latter to the size of the active viewport. However, this often leads to a weird disproportional look of the object(s) relative the the viewport, because the distance from the object to the 4 sides (from left to right, and from top to bottom) of the viewport is not equal in pure pixel count.

While I can totally understand the logic behind the 3d bounding box to zoom-in with “Zoom selected” (it works great on objects such like boxes and spheres), I would like to have an alternative command called “True zoom” that will fit the selection to the exact center of the viewport and leave equal distance from left to right and from top to bottom. Obviously, in this case Rhino will have to use a 2d rectangle to calculate the position of the selection on the screen. That feature will be extremely useful while doing renderings, drawings or screenshots of objects with more complex shape like the one shown in this example.

---

A possible bug maybe? Not sure why, but after the latest update my Rhino 7 shows a tooltip in German language with an empty RMB command:

[clement]

Hi @Rhino_Bulgaria,

you might play with the command SetZoomExtendsBorder which allows you to control the border width for parallel and perspective views. This can also be done with a macro where you set your border value(s) before calling Zoom Extents or Zoom Selected and then resetting the border values to the defaults.

For Wish 2 it might be possible to script by generating a 2d bounding box, i’ll have to try…

_
c.

[seltzdesign (Armin Seltz)]

It would be great if it could just use the Safe Frame of Rhino for this in a second command like ZoomToSafeFrame.

from this:

to this:

We built our own ZoomSelected algorithm in a software a while ago and added a way to add some % of zooming out to achieve the same.

[jari.huuskola]

For wish 1:

1. zoom selected
2. zoom with factor of 0.75 (or 0.5)

For wish 2:

1. zoom selected
2. set the zoom factor (optional)
3. slightly lower the Z of the camera target

[Rhino_Bulgaria (Bobi)]

Hello guys, thank you for the input. And sorry for the late reply, I was too busy and didn’t had a chance to try your suggestions in Rhino for a while.

I tested the SetZoomExtentsBorder command and it works great. However, Rhino still suffers a lot by the other issue described in my Wish #2, i.e. inability to place the model in the perfect middle of the screen due to using a 3d bounding box instead of a 2d one.

I totally agree that a new command called ZoomToSafeFrame is much needed. Not sure why it’s missing in Rhino, considering the fact that it’s an essential tool for those who do drawings, renderings and screen-shots. This is why the majority of 3d modeling and rendering programs have it since decades in their Rendering settings. After all, the safe frame is used to position the scene objects in a way that they leave a certain amount of free space around the border.