If you were paying close attention to our one million member celebration yesterday, you may have noticed something a little different as you explored our scene.
As you know we always listen carefully to feature requests from our community so I’m proud to share a new feature that many of you will find helpful when it comes to showing off your work in the best light. Let’s face it. We all have our best side, and there’s a chance your work does too. Perhaps you didn’t model the rear of a building, or would prefer that viewers didn’t see the polygonal mess you left under a ground plane.
Starting today PRO subscribers can now add camera limits to their scenes to control how they can be explored in our player. You can limit the rotation of the camera in both horizontal and vertical directions and even limit zooming. The new feature can be found in our 3D editor under the first “Scene” tab with the Gear icon, under the camera roll-out. Once activated, the limits are shown in the form of a gizmo that can also be manipulated, and the limits can be previewed.
The 3D editor lets you preview the limits in action. This scene is a perfect example where you may not wish viewers to be able to peek under the ground plane. Do so by limiting vertical rotation.
In all cases, you get to specify how far you want the limits to be. Don’t want visitors to zoom in too closely on your work? Check. Prefer that they can’t rotate the camera behind, above, or underneath your work? Check. By default limits are left off, allowing your work to be fully explore. But remember, don’t get sloppy with your modeling. Your work is still viewable from all angles in VR!
Exploring the scene you’ll also notice that we’ve limited the amount you can zoom out and zoom in.
A huge thanks to Curlscurly for letting us demo our new feature with her scene. Be sure to check out more of her great work.
About the author
Paul Chambers
Artist Evangelist & Community outreach at Sketchfab, freelance CG Generalist, render-farm tinkerer. Zelda worshipper.
Hi, I’m a big fan of the camera limits feature…and it’s very nice GUI for making tweaks.
Another super helpful feature would be a bounding box for navigation. I see many scenes of environments on Sketchfab that would greatly benefit from even a simple cube boundary to limit navigation (either in orbit or first person views). It’s a great way to keep viewers from peeking ‘behind the scenes’ and certainly fantastic for helping newbies to 3D viewing not get lost and disoriented by drifting way off course.
I poked around the forums to see if it had been requested already, but didn’t find anything.
thanks! -Chad
I’ll pass it on, thanks for the suggestion!