Moving great distances in a scene...how?

Griffin Avid

SO I bumped up from figures to landscapes etc....

How do I move great distances across a scene beyond using the scroll and the navigation tools in the upper right?

I asked this before, but I don't see a way to find my previous posts..

And I assume until I have a certain number of posts, I won't be able to do advanced forum things...

dreamfarmer

You can drop Nulls as bookmarks. (Or cameras. This is why it's great when big landscape products come with lots of cameras.) You can go to top view and drag your camera around like it's a prop. 

You can also seriously speed up your scrolling speed. The keybind is in the settings somewhere. 

 

Alternately in top view you could drag around the scenery base everything is parented to and leave your camera at origin.  This is useful for lighting purposes, among other things. 

Tobor

If you're using Iray, I'd move the scene and keep the camera(s) at or near world center. There are some lighting/texturing bugs involved with moving the camera far off from 0,0,0 that I'm not sure have been fixed in the recent 4.9 betas. You may or may not hit this bug, depending on the scene and lighting you use, but when you do, it's a real pain. You'll know it when you see things like the shadow of otherwise invisible scalp base of your character's hair.

sriesch

I'm experimenting with creating a few planes in a scene, for example one 10 meters wide and another 100 meters wide and making them invisible.  From the top view I can quick select the x10 or the x100 object in the scene tab and hit frame so I can alternate between being zoomed out and zoomed in.  One could have several of the smaller ones at key positions in the scene so you could jump to that part of the scene.