The steering wheel feature is ridiculous to me as all of the buttons on it can be replaced with key shortcuts.

My first question is, what are the keyboard shortcuts for pan/look/orbit camera modes, if any? For example in other softwares you can hold D and then drag the mouse to orbit around your focal point.

My second question;
Isn’t there a fast way to move the camera over to (or point the camera at) the selected object?
A big problem for me is having to pan around constantly in the left/right/top/bottom orthogonal view inside a massive scene.

Also when working on the animation of some objects, it would be very useful to be able to snap an orthogonal camera’s view to an object so that I can watch the objects movement through the scene without having to constantly stop the animation and pan over. Is there a feature like this?

And third, how do you zoom in and out in left/right/top/bottom views? or are you really forced to look at a predefined small portion of your scene in these views? :(

Thanks in advance for any help, hopefully the answers to these questions will be helpful to others as well :)

middle mouse button = pan
alt+middle mouse button = orbit
ctrl+alt+middle mouse button OR wheel = dolly/zoom
These work in all viewports.

to move the camera to the selected object, select it and press “zoom extents selected”, which is on the lower right of your interface or just press “Z”

Try linking a camera to your moving object to freeze it’s motion.

Max has tons of hotkeys and newer versions come with a cool cardboard cube with many of them listed.  It’s a fun way to learn them.

Brad T.

“Hush, may I ask you all for silence?  The dreamer is still asleep.”

Thanks so much BradleyT, that post will save me a lot of time! :)

But wait, it is not too late to deploy the ‘strokes’ utility!  Why limit your middle mouse to 3 features when you can map nearly unlimited commands to the strokes feature?

When people familiar with Max watch me work they are stupefied how quickly I can invoke all these magical commands,..  and with a custom quad menu things can go FAST!

Customizing the Gooey is so underrated, yet so powerful for productivity - and the strokes thing, well hardly anyone taps it because they get used to the zoom pan thing, which of course is one of my strokes.  Here are a few more assignments

enter/exit subobject mode, hide unselected face, unhide all faces (both sub-object commands), zoom, pan, zoom selected, show last rendering, UNDO, arc rotate, save/restore active view, change to perspective view, toggle safe frame, select inverse,…

CTRL & ALT combinations work for mapping the quickest strokes as well.  Only caveat is that there is now way to save the settings, but you will likely remember them, like dialing the phone, I call it body memory - and remapping goes pretty quick on other systems or new releases.

-Shea

http://www.youtube.com/user/SheaDesign

http://www.shea-design.com/

BradleyT 27 June 2008 05:49 PM

alt+middle mouse button = orbit

That is actually “look” mode, not orbit.

Anyone know the keyboard shortcut to orbit with the camera?

I tried googling the shortcut but google returned this forum thread as a result! :)

Edit: Oh nevermind, maybe it is orbit, my pivot point was just set to some strange thing and orbit was behaving like look :)