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Monday, September 11, 2006

Tip: The Fastest Way to Center the 3D Cursor on the Grid

We've all done it and absolutely hate it! You're blendering away and @#$!, you accidentally left-click and there goes the 3D Cursor. Normally, you would have to snap the Cursor to the grid from the Top and Side views, a process involving several clicks and keystrokes...ugh. Your creative flow has been interrupted, not good.

Well, here's how to resolve that issue with a single keystroke:

Press Shift-C. This will center the viewport so that all objects are visible and, it also returns the 3D Cursor to the grid's origin!


Now, here's another quick tip to go along with the usage of Shift-C.

Let's say that you've got a pretty involved scene and you were working on a smaller aspect of that scene when you used Shift-C. Since this will center ALL objects within the 3D View, you now have to work your way back to whatever object or set of vertices you were working on. Again, not good.

Well, here's how to resolve that issue with a click and a keystroke:

Select the object(s) or vert(s) and press Numpad-Del. This will give you a local view of what's selected WITHOUT moving the 3D Cursor!


Happy Blendering.


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8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice article, thanx ;)

Anonymous said...

BlenderNewbies.com looks like it's going to be something special and I would love to help out if you need it. I have a smattering of videos on my personal site (geneome.net) that I link to on BlenderNation articles from time to time. You could certainly use them on BlenderNewbies if you find them up to snuff. You can contact me at my personal site if you want to talk more!

Kernon Dillon said...

Thanks for the encouragement and offer! I will definitely keep that in mind.

Roger's Blogger tinkering blog said...

If you want to center the cursor without affecting your view- simply add an empty, then hit alt-g to clear the empty's location.

It will pop back to the origin and you can re-center the cursor with shift-s > cursor to selected.

Anonymous said...

You know, you could just split your window, shift-c on the window you're not going to use, the original window's view won't be affected

Mike Massonnet said...

After hitting shift+c you can follow it by c to recenter the view, anyway, nice to learn about numpad-del :-)

waseem said...

Thx so much..... And i thought i had to do it whole again.... thx so much... It is the right time i got to see this.. I was just about to give up my project and create a new one

Anonymous said...

Ctrl-z followed by Ctrl-y does the trick for me...

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