view center

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Modeling Menus

   Center in View (command)

Pan so what matters sits in the middle, at the zoom you already have.

Menu: View > Center in View | In depth: The canvas

Center is the quieter half of Zoom to Fit. Zoom to Fit decides a new zoom for you; Center keeps the zoom you chose and only slides the view across. Use it when you are working at a magnification you want to stay at and have simply drifted off to one side.

Neither window gives it a keyboard shortcut.

The two windows center on different things

This is the one thing worth knowing about the command, because the two are easy to confuse and the menus almost agree on the name.

• Modeling window, Center in View centers on your selection, using the bounds of the whole selection rather than one object. With nothing selected it does nothing and says so in the status bar, which is a prompt rather than a failure: pick something first.
• Node editor, Center is on its own View menu and centers on every node in the node graph, selected or not. There is nothing to select first. On an empty node graph it does nothing.

So in the modeling window Center answers "bring this to me", and in the node editor it answers "bring all of it back". If you select a node and expect the pane to come to it, that is Zoom to Fit's job in that window, not Center's.

In the modeling window

Center keeps clear of the Layers panel the same way Zoom to Fit does: it centers the selection in the part of the canvas the panel is not covering, so a centered object does not end up half behind it.

Note

Center changes the view and nothing else. It does not move the objects it centers on, and it leaves your selection exactly as it was.

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