It seems that navigating the 3D world of a design software file can sometimes become a pain and it is easy to end up in a strange viewing angle causing you to just want to get back to a default view that you like. Most of the Autodesk products now utilize a tool that allows you to create a default viewing angle and save that view so that you can get back to it with one click of the mouse. That tool is part of the ViewCube.
Adjacent to the ViewCube is a small house that has a tooltip that states “Home” when you move your mouse over the icon. Picking that Home icon will take you to the view that is established as the default “Home” view.
To get the Home icon to go to your desired default view:
- Rotate your 3D view to any orientation that you desire,
- Right-click over any part of the ViewCube or the Home icon,
- Select the “Set Current View as Home” option from the context-sensitive menu.
Voila, now all you have to do to get back to that default view is pick the Home icon.
A couple of important notes are:
- There is only ONE default Home view for the file. That means that different 3D views cannot each have its own default Home view. (You can set the 3D view to any angle that you desire, but cannot use the Home icon to get back to that angle in that view.)
- In Revit, the ViewCube is only visible in 3D views.
- In Navisworks and AutoCAD-based products, the ViewCube can be visible in more than just 3D views.
If the ViewCube is not visible, the following methods will turn it on:
- Revit-based products – View tab -> Windows panel -> expand User Interface -> checkmark next to ViewCube
- AutoCAD-based products – View tab -> Windows panel -> expand User Interface -> checkmark next to ViewCube
- Navisworks products – View tab -> Navigation Aids panel -> select View Cube
This feature is especially useful when creating Revit families and saving a default preview view that will be seen when selecting the file to open.
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