Camera orbit center while painting driving me crazy.

[Anonymous]

Hello there.

I'm painting some walls in 3D view, and the camera always orbit around the center of the entire building, what makes it impossible to paint the walls without some crazy mouse clicking, it's completely unintuitive, and it's not possible to select an object in this mode afaik in order to orbit around it.

In this case, the camera could orbit around where you're pointing the cursor to, that would be far better.

Man, this 3D "navigation" thing is a problem with all Autodesk products I"ve tried, 3Ds Max also has a completely unintuitive viewport navigation, and It's very hard to look at what you want. While other 3D programs has very intuitive ways to let you look at whatever you want from any point, some even let you fly through à la shooter games.

I hope there's a solution for that, or maybe I'm doing it wrong... to "paint" the walls i'm splitting faces and using the paint tool, maybe I wasn't supposed to do that.

Thanks in advance.

[loboarch · Accepted solution]

You should be able to select an object in 3d mode.  With an object selected that becomes the center of rotation rather than the total model.  I am not sure why you are unable to select an object in a 3d view.  You can also use the SteeringWheel to manually place a center of rotation whereever you like without selecting an object.

[Anonymous]

You're 100% correct.

I thought the object had to be selected in order to orbit it, and as when painting no object is actually "selected" (at least visibly), I thought there was no way. But if you select an object (so it becomes the center) and then activate the paint mode, the object gets deselected but the center doesn't change. Also, i don't use the SteeringWheel but I'm assuming it should work also.

Thank you.

PS: still, imho, this thing is very unintuituve, and I don't think i'm the exception because in most cases (including other bim and 3d modellers) I can do everything simply by using my intuition and common sense, but on Revit and 3Ds Max, it's just impossible, you have to read the manuals and tutorials otherwise you can't do anything. Anyway, as long as it's possible to do I don't really care, it's a little painful and takes more time than I'd like to get used to it, but it's okay.