Quick Tip: Set a Viewpoint from the Quick Access Toolbar
Once you have established a 3D viewpoint—using whatever method you prefer—many of you are aware that you can save that view by name so you can restore it later in other viewports or after you have gone back to the Plan view.
Named views are great, but they are saved in the current drawing. What if you would like to use that particular “eyeball position” on all your drawings?
The following procedure can be accomplished while you’re in model space or in a viewport.
How to Capture a non-Standard Viewpoint
1. Set your view to a position other than one found in the standard collection of NE, NW, etc.
Hint: You can hold down the Shift key, then use you wheel-mouse pan feature and (slowly) move your cursor to kick your system into 3D orbit.
2. With the view the way you want it, enter –VPOINT (the leading dash/hyphen is the key to this trick), and in the history above the default command line, you see the viewpoint stated as VIEWDIR= [X,Y,Z], similar to this:
VIEWDIR = 8'-5 9/16",-20'-1 13/16",7'-10 7/8"
3. Jot down the numbers, rounding them to the nearest whole number. You don’t have to include the feet since the values define the vector position of your eyeball. For my position, I’ll use 8,-20,8.
4. Open the CUI.
5. In the Command list, right click on ‘View, Viewpoint’ then click Duplicate (which is, effectively, a Copy + Paste). The copy will have an Element ID with an ‘MMU’ prefix.
6. Now modify the Properties to something like you see in the image shown.
7. For the macro, enter the following, replacing the X,Y,Z with the values you got from Step 2, above:
^C^C-VPOINT;X,Y,Z
Memo: It’s really important that there are NO spaces in the macro string of characters.
8. In the upper left quadrant of the CUI, under Customizations in All Files, expand Quick Access Toolbar 1, then expand Quick Access Toolbars.
9. Now, drag and drop your new View button up into the QAT command listing.
10. Click OK to close the CUI and save your changes.
The next time you have a drawing and want that very same eyeball position, hit that button!
