Selectively preserve viewport focal length during Camera to View
Ctrl Alt 0 (Camera to View) has insufficient functionality. Found a position and angle you like in the 3D viewer you like? Too bad, you press Ctrl Alt 0 and it's gone in favor of an improperly cropped version. If you want the real view, the one you actually requested, you may not have it. You can only approximate it by manually dragging the camera. I have never observed any demand for this behavior being the default - let alone the only available functionality! It is sensible only for the cases where you've already established a focal depth for your scene.
Ctrl-Alt-0 should be able to set the camera's position and rotation AND the focal length to the current 3D view. The exact details of my preferred view are right on the screen - I want those transferred to my active camera, entirely, not just sort of.
Preserving the existing focal point would be a setting in the "View" properties menu along with the view locking options. Leaving it on by default would retain the current usage; turning it off would give you the intuitive functionality that people expect.
As mentioned, there are methods of manually grabbing or locking the camera after the fact, and these are suggested to users as substitutes. But since they require extensive manual twiddling, and cannot preserve the existing 3D view, they aren't substitutes.
Unless the 3D viewport uses a wildly alien coordinate system incapable of being mapped to a conventional camera, I don't see any obstacle or downside to implementation.
There is an existing proposal resembling this, but it doesn't propose any flexibility (e.g. settings to preserve your existing focal lengths), leaving it unlikely to be implemented.
6 Comments
To get a 100% accurate camera from viewport you also need the option to change the render dimensions of the scene to the width and height of the specified viewport. blenderartists.org/t/notes-to-self-about-re-learning-maya-ignore-this/1281543/18
I think this could be useful. I think the simple way to have this feature would be to have a properties panel for the CTLR + SHIFT + 0 operation in bottom left, just like you get properties panel when you do for example beveling.
Just like many tools Blender has (for example bevel), you have those properties to fine tune the settings for your operation, the camera also could benefit of having similar properties and let users select if they wanna copy the viewport settings or not. Maybe some additional features could easily be added into that panel too.
However, I wouldn't probably make it default, because sometimes you don't wanna have the viewport settings added to your camera. The viewport focal length works nicely for modeling, but I'm not sure if it's good for rendering always. I sometimes wanna manually change the focal length to mimic some specific lens, for example.
I really hope Blender foundation would give little love for the camera also, and this could be a good addition to the additional camera features.
Other one could be that tilt shift thing I requested here: blender.community/c/rightclickselect/x6zE/
Then we also should have an aperture editor to manually edit the aperture size and maybe even shape of our cameras. That would allow you to create for example heart bokeh.
blender.community/c/rightclickselect/Wgfbbc/
Also, other camera related features such this: blender.community/c/rightclickselect/RZgbbc/
blenderartists.org/t/camera-fit-view-add-on/1285195
Haven't tested it yet, but if it works, this would be great to have included by default!
try it out, I had the same complaint- i've been using this addon ever since
hmm i dont really understand that without a screenshot , im using an addon called "stored views" which can set the camera or a new camera to the viewpoort .. but its also cropped to the camera.
i guess you want the full viewport put into a camera as fit as possible ??