I’m not well versed with all the proper camera/scene terms.
I am trying to view/create scenes of a room from 4 different “elevations” but from a perspective view, looking down somewhat. East, west, north, south.
Trying to describe a little more. I would like create the same distance, tilt for 4 views of a nearly square room.
I thought perhaps of grouping and rotating the entire model from its center point, but would I need to duplicate the group 4x and turn on the proper group’s view for each scene.
I hope I’ve described what I’m trying to do sort of clearly.
Place a vertical edge at the center of your model as the Point of Focus, then place an edge at the point you want to view from. Then use the Position Camera tool to drag between those two points and the camera will move to that view, if correct save as scene. Then simply radial array the outer edge around your model and repeat the position camera and create scene process. Once you have created the scenes you can delete the edges.
@Box has it exactly right. His scheme will enable you to precisely locate camera positions … be it by distance and height, distance and angle of elevation … or any other metric you want to duplicate for each scene.
And then be sure to create a unique scene for each camera location … and then NEVER move the camera location in any of those scenes (or, alternatively … unclick “Camera Location” as a “Property to save” for each of those scenes.) Typically I make heavy use of a “Working scene” … so I never inadvertently update a scene once it is “defined.”
Is there any way to save this as a “permanent” camera view? I.e. the built-in Sketchup “Camera → Standard Views → Iso” is one of these, can I somehow make it “Standard Views → Iso North”, “Standard Views → Iso South”, “Standard Views → Iso East”, and “Standard Views → Iso West”?
Or it’s always going to be just this scene setup that I have to manually duplicate to a new project?
Why don’t you create a template with scenes already set up for the views you need? If required you can fine tune the camera position for the scenes and update them but at least you don’t end up setting them up from scratch every time.
I don’t use ISO views but my Schematic Design template in SKP (keyed with LO) has 90% of what I need to get a design into customers hands - Tag, working a presentation scenes including sections, elevations and plans. Once the model is ready for the client I adjust a few of the scenes, maybe move the section planes a bit, save and ‘Send to Layout…’
Once I ‘send to layout’ and pick which template I want, tweak a few things, add some labels and dimensions, update the client name, etc. and then export.
I used pretty much the method Box used but with a circle on the ground (and 24 steps)
whenever I need a 360, I’ll open the template, import the file in it and place it around the crosshair (scale it if needed), hide the help tag and bam.
Curiously, I could see the all different components in the scene thumbnails, but no components only the background on the main canvas as I selected each scene? Hence the 422KB size?