Horrible camera perspective rotation

[Anonymous]

I've been using 3ds for almost three years now, extensively. Since day one I have thought the same thing, the camera is absolutely horrible but since I could never find anyone else complaining about roughly the same aspect of the camera I just mostly dealt with it. 

The problem is basically what the camera decides to rotate around (when you click and hold middle mouse + alt). I don't know how the application decides whether to rotate around the scene or the object in front of you/object selected but it seems absolutely random. From what I've gathered the camera has a kind of pivot point around which it rotates. This pivot point is wherever the center of the screen is so if you're looking at an object and if you did a raytrace from the center of your viewport and it actually hits the object then voala it will actually rotate around it. Say you had an elongated model that spans far from one end of the scene to the other and then try to pan to one end, if the center of the screen happens to be a pixel off the object well then bye bye because your camera is now miles away from the object so press Z to center the camera then do more panning then zoom in then rotate and goodbye again. 

Is there an option to disable this horribly made adaptive camera rotation? It's especially annoying when working with long models or small models. 

[Anonymous]

Hi

Please always use Ctrl+R (Orbit object) while creating a camera, Always use the circle center as a view center.

Also, you can use Field of view for a better camera angle.

And finally, when you create the camera, Add one modifier to it which is Camera correction which will edit the vertically and the balance of your camera.

Hope that will make it easier for you.

Good Luck

Regards

ME

[Anonymous]

You could try using a target camera, I know a lot of people dislike them but I find it much easier especially for things like you mention being able to control the point it rotates around as you can keep your target still and rotate just the camera around it. 

[Anonymous]

I wasn't referring to a camera object, I'm talking about the actual perspective viewport camera, the one you literally look at everything with.

I found that the 'orbit sub-object' functionality works best, but it's far from anything great. The biggest problem being, if I'm trying to model details on a small scale, unless I have a vertex selected or the pivot is near what I'm trying to edit then the camera will just fly off when I try to pan. 

Another annoying problem is the zoom, during some occasions if I try to zoom in too much, my camera will just end up slowing down so much that I can no longer zoom in. This happens if I press Z on the object I'm editing and the camera focuses on it far away. I noticed this is an addition to max 2016 and I get that it's to stop the camera from zooming through the object you're editing but it's really poorly done and does more harm than good. 

Wouldn't a tradition WASD camera be better? Something that actually works well, or are you against that?

[Anonymous]

I generally just use the navigation wheel (shift+w)

You can centre the rotation point (click and hold the centre option and release on an object) and the zoom works in relation to this.