View rotation by 90 degree at arbitrary viewpoint

[Anonymous]

I'm tempted to put that into the Idea-station, but it feels as if it should be there and I'm just not aware of the feature, so I'm putting it as a question here first:

How can I quickly rotate my camera view by exactly 90 degrees around the axis perpendicular to the screen, i.e. the direction I'm viewing.?

When I'm in one of the primary-views, I can of course do this pretty easily with the convenient navigation tool in the top right:But what if I want to do the same thing when I'm viewing from any custom angle? Sudenly, these rotation arrows are no longer available

I quite often find myself in the following situation:

- I have a sketch on a face which is at arbitrary orientation to the coordinate grid.

- I double-click the sketch, and it conveniently zooms and orients the view

- However, I do not like the rotation of the sketch (f.e. because it is "upside down" to my thinking of a problem), so I want to rotate the view 90 or 180 degrees.

- I don't have a fancy controller, so I'm stuck with regular mouse movements and short-keys and then I can't find the feature I need.

Note, I don't want to rotate "approximately" 90 degrees or such. I want an exact, instant rotation at one or max two clicks.

Essentially, what I think should be there (hence Idea-station) is, that the rotate arrows in the navigator should remain available regardless of the current view and always perform the rotation just relative to the current view. Convenient, simple, easy to find. In a word: The obvious place.

Nevertheless my question first: How am I supposed to do this?

The way I currently do it is a bit awkward:

- First auto-orient to the face

- Then right-click the tool to set the current view as new "front"

- then the arrows are there again.

- Once I'm done, I reset the "front" again.

Yes, it works, but it is (unnecessary) complicated in my opinion.

Maybe (hopefully) there is a better way already? (If not, Idea-station it is...)

[jasonhomrighaus · Accepted solution]

You could use the constrained orbit tool at the bottom center of your window.

[Anonymous]

Thanks @jasonhomrighaus,

I knew about the constraint rotation tool, but that does not allow me to exactly rotate 90 degrees, or does it? (A shortcut key or anything?)

It is by far not as convenient as the "rotate 90degrees arrow" ones has for front/top/back oriented views, so I'll go to the IdeaStation nevertheless.

Thanks for confirming that this is not just something I've not known how to do...

BTW, I'm using "bright" setup and only now have seen the handles. With their size and light-grey color they are near-invisible on my 4k screen :c)

[mhag33tg2]

Hi, I have a similar need.  I am trying to align a rectangular shaped component by about 8.8 degrees around an axis normal to my screen (the camera), so that it is square to my view.  Normally I just click "look at" and it brings components around nicely, but for some reason one of my components remains tilted even after doing "look at".  I need to get it aligned so I can create a view to use for my 2D drawings.  

I checked the instructions here (https://help.autodesk.com/view/fusion360/ENU/?guid=GUID-7B742BB2-65B3-4ADA-9B11-9D57E1E31292 )  and also various support articles and this seems to be the closest enquiry to what I need.  The instructions do not explain this orbit functionality well enough.   It only says" Orbit: Rotates the current view around the center mark (constrained orbit) or around the X and Y axes (free orbit). "    I only discovered it by luck and tried the orbit and constrained orbit thing that Jason describes and discovered those arms on the circle to restrict rotation to one axis.  It took me a bit longer to learn that if I click on the feint circle rather than the lines I can get it to orbit around the axis normal to the screen.   But how I get exactly 8.8 degrees is still not clear.

By the way the circle and lines indicator that comes up are too feint and subtle.  The only reason I noticed it was the cursor changed when I passed over it.  Also it could be very helpful if a little thing (a sphere) like that circle with those wings could come up momentarily below the view cube to allow you to manipulate by that instead of the view cube.  The big circle in the middle of the screen is sometimes hard to see with all my components and clutter in the way.

I also tried a method of "looking at a face" that is perpendicular to the one I want and then rotating 90 degrees from there  to get my needed face normal, but no luck with that.   But "look at" does at least bring that other face around square so I will  try to use that lesser face as the base view in my 2D drawing and abandon my quest for 8.8 degrees.

I too also often want to rotate the view about an axis pointing directly out of the screen but have never been able to figure out how to make that work, so this discovery is a great thing for me.  So thanks Jason.