Hi, For awhile now I've had a bit of a problem with my cameras while I'm constructing things in Carrara. While I'm modeling I tend to twist and turn my view of an object to see it from all possible angles. After awhile my camera view starts to look kinda weird, I end up with distorted twisted, almost fish-eye, kind of views and it's always a pain to get the view back to normal. When it happens with camera1 (or 2..etc), its not so bad since I can just select the camera and set it straight. But when I mess up the director's camera, it's harder to "un-twist" the camera view. Any suggestions on how to avoid this? Oh and while I'm at it. When in the spline modeling room, every time I go to the grid dialogue box and check or uncheck the snap to button, an error message pops up. I click OK, it disappears and all is well, but it is a bit of a nuisance. Anybody else experience this? Thanks, H&B

I dunno if it can be avoided, but I just refresh the director's camera (from the menu) when it gets really squirrly.

Try not to use the Zoom feature on the perspective camera views, only the orthagonal ones. (i.e. Top, Bottom, Left...) Instead use the camera controls to Dolly, Pan and Truck. This way you always have a 100% camera view which isn't distorted and better control over the camera as well.

Oddly, I have not found that quite true. I tried holding down to only movements, and besides being much slower, the same distortions crept in (slower, perhaps, but still there). Related to this, I recently was working on an apartment building in scale and set up the workspace for 1-meter scale and a 50-meter working box. The camera, however, seemed to be still locked at figure scale; an infinate amount of scrolling to get it around this large structure, and the reference position quite unusable. When I have the time I'm going to experiment with different settings for the working box and find out what the relationship is with the camera. One thing I like very much about the last update to 3, tho, is that if you have a split screen, each window "remembers" how you had the ortho cameras set. By going to the same window you get the same camera setting back, even if you moved it in another window.

I find it interesting that you're still getting problems with camera views even though you've restricted yourself to the camera dolly controls. I don't experience this problem at all. 1.) Do not use the zoom tool (magnifying glass) in any of the normal camera views (as stated by bluetone). 2.) Do not use the hand tool for the same camera situations. If you turn on the production frame, you can see where the center of view is for the camera and begin to understand what you're doing to get yourself drifted off of it. As for the error in the grid dialogue box, that's an error I get ALL the time and it's not just restricted to fussing with the snap option. It's also not repeatable! It's some kind of leak in the code that's been there for a long time. It has never seemed to get me screwed up though. I just keep acknowledging it and keep on modeling. -Kix

Thanks for the responses guys, it will surely help. Cheers, H&B

I'm assuming the "Send camera to..." function is not adequate? I sometimes sprinkle several cameras around in a scene, each one looking at a particular feature or view I'll want to return to. Usually I have: 1) A render cam. 2) One or more "modeling" cams. 3) The director's camera which gets twisted every which way and periodically sent to one of my modeling cam views. - Jasen.

Seems like a scheme. I was just working on a little model and I noticed the Assembly Room cameras (director et al) move nice and brisk. It is manually zooming in and out in the Vertex room that is incredibly slow.