Oh man didn't mean to take up your time this much, that is a lengthy answer. I was not aware of the Exact command affecting alignment of edges during loft, I thought it only affected loft direction. Thank you.

Hi Val, no problem!

The navigating part in particular is just a bit hard to explain in too short of an answer without it being cryptic...

Hopefully some of those tips about using Zoom area to get centered on a particular point, and also the zoom button for a more subtle approach slower zoom may help.


> I thought it only affected loft direction.

The direction of a section is actually controlled by clicking on the profile curve in the viewport while in the Loft options stage. A click on a section during that time will reverse it and if it is a closed section there is also a seam grip that will appear which can be dragged to alter the connecting seam between the profiles.

But there is an automatic optimization process that tries to figure out good direction and seam placement for you, which usually does a good job. So most of the time it is not necessary to adjust the directions manually, unless you want to purposely introduce twist.

- Michael

Hi Val, also another thing I added in now for the next v2 beta is if you hold down the Ctrl key while using the wheel, it will go in a smaller increment. Also if Ctrl is down it won't do the "slide target point forward" thing that normally happens when you get close to the target point.

That should then be another way to help allow zooming in more closely to a small detail in the perspective 3D view.

But the zooming action in perspective still does move towards the target point, so if you are trying to approach to a specific point it is a good idea to set that point as the target point with Zoom area so that you will step right up towards it instead of possibly going past it.

The other thing you had noticed previously, where sometimes you may get a situation where one click of the wheel forward and then backward does not necessarily take you to the precise same original spot is just a normal consequence of how zooming works in a perspective view - in perspective the zooming is not really an exactly controlled thing, it is accomplished by moving the eye/camera point around. The amount of distance that each wheel click moves is dependent on the current distance from the eye to the target point, it will use a fraction of that distance. But after every move that distance has changed, so a movement outwards will not necessarily use the precise exact same distance as what the previous forward step used. If it always used just a hard coded distance to move forward or backwards, it would provide a kind of forward/backward symmetry but it would have a lot of other problems because it would be even easier yet to zoom right on past some detail that the target point is focused on. By moving by a distance that is a fraction of the current length between the eye and target, it kind of helps make the movement approach the target rather than just fly right past it all the time.

If you switch off perspective in the 3D viewport, then all of this works quite a bit differently, the zooming in a parallel viewport is controlled by changing a scale factor value and not by moving the eye point around in the scene.

- Michael

Thanks once again, all of your tips are very helpful. I was not aware of how view operation really functions. I will keep an eye out for other things/issues.