How to FOCUS THE CAMERA on an object in Blender

Introduction

Sometimes we are looking at a certain part of a scene in Blender and we need to visualize an object that is located in other place, if we don’t have so much experience using Blender this can be a big problem because controlling the view and the render camera could be quite challenging.

The TIP we are going to see in this article could save you in more than one time, we will see how to quickly focus the view on an object and also how to make the rendering camera move and focus a target object.

Video tutorial on how to focus the view on an object in Blender


Focus the view on an object in Blender

In order to quickly FOCUS the view on an object in Blender we select the object and press the dot key on the numeric keypad (Numpad .), with this we go from the situation shown in figure 1 below to figure 2, in which the view is centered on the origin of the selected object. If you don’t have a numeric keypad you can select the object, click on “View” and then choose the “Frame Selected” option, this will focus the view on the selected object aswell.

blender viewport window with selected object that is not centered in the viewport.
Fig. 1: We start from this situation in which the selected object is not centered in the view.
blender viewport window with the view centered on the origin of the selected object
Fig. 2: Pressing the dot on the numeric keypad moves the view to focus on the origin of the selected object.

Focus the camera on an object in Blender

The idea is similar in this case, but we want to move the RENDER CAMERA so that is focused on the selected object.

We start from the situation shown in figure 3 below in which we are seeing the camera perspective, the camera view can be activated with the zero key on the numeric keypad (Numpad 0).

We go to the view tab shown in figure 4 and activate the “Camera to View” checkbox, this will allow us to control the position and orientation of the rendering camera by zooming, panning and rotating the view. In case you do not see the View panel is because it is hidden, it can be displayed with the N key or the arrow icon that is observed in the upper right corner of Figure 3 (slightly above and to the right of the green circle with the letter Y).

blender viewport window with selected object that is not centered in the rendering camera.
Fig. 3: We start from this situation in which the rendering camera is not centered on the selected object.
Option to lock the camera to the 3D view in blender
Fig. 4: Option to lock the camera to the 3D view.

When the camera is locked to the 3D view you can see the red dotted box, now to center the camera on the object we select the object and press the dot on the numeric keypad, so we go from the situation in figure 5 to the situation in figure 6.

blender viewport window with selected object not centered on the rendering camera, camera is locked to the 3d viewport
Fig. 5: When the camera is locked to the 3D view it shows a red dotted line.
the camera was centered on an object in Blender by selecting the object and pressing the dot key from the numpad
Fig. 6: Pressing the dot on the numeric keypad centers the view on the origin of the selected object.

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