Inventor Change Centre of Rotation

simple tip and trick which is often over looked or unknown for those of us who don’t use.

When rotating a model/assembly in your view a lot of people utilise the orbit command (from the navigation bar or hold down F4). This allows you to rotate the view either freely by placing your mouse in the middle of the circle or constraining the rotation to virtual axis by hovering near the markers. If you want these axis to match your models then you need to start this tool from a fixed view cube position (ie top or front etc).

The nice thing with this tool is you can change the position of rotation by clicking anywhere and this will centre the view to where you click (as long as you don’t see the exit glyph) or you can move it by panning the view (hold the middle mouse button). This tool does have its advantages ie the constrained axis rotation. But I find that the way it re-centres the view when you move the pivot point can make some view and orientations difficult to achieve.

Luckily there is always another way of doing things. I myself prefer to use a slightly different method of view rotation. I hold down the shift key and the middle mouse button. This gives you the same free orbit but you don’t have access to the constrained rotation. The advantage of using this method is that if you select an edge, face, feature, part, component it will use that as the centre of rotation. It will even remember that centre of rotation if you deselect until you select something else. The other advantage of this is that you can zoom and pan and the centre of rotation will stay as selected rather than always be the centre of your screen which the first above method does.