A small plugin that aligns the viewport perpendicular to any visible face — from Object Mode
View Align Face
A Blender add-on (Blender 4.2+) that aligns the viewport perpendicular to any
visible face — from Object Mode, by hovering and clicking it. No Edit Mode,
no face selection, no mesh editing. Then pick which side of that face becomes the
view (Top / Bottom / Front / Back / Left / Right), like a CAD "look at face".
Version 0.3.0.
Blender can already do this, but only in Edit Mode and only after you
select a face (Shift+Numpad 1/3/7). This add-on brings the same idea to
Object Mode, which is where IFC/Bonsai models are usually inspected.
https://hub.openingdesign.com/OpeningDesign/Utility_Apps/src/commit/44691370c32253dbb901c63ac9f9e9d1fe8b7739/Blender/addons/View Align Face
Comments
@theoryshaw That is really nice! Why not adding it to Bonsai as a PR? I think it is a really nice navigation tool.
You have produced a number of others that I also find very useful and it is a pity to not have them in Bonsai to improve the ways of working with it:
Maybe there should be a "View" module receiving all these?
Thanks!
Yeah we really need to have a way to integrate all of these QoL improvements somehow so people may be able to use it. would also I think help you reduce amount of boilerplate to maintain separate addons. Cheers
I would love, love for these little plugins to get integrated into Bonsai.
My only hesitation, however, is that a lot of these can be used on vanilla blender. That is, they don't require Bonsai to be installed. If they get integrated are we losing the opportunity for others, outside the AEC system, using and evolving these tools?
I wonder if there could be a happy medium I wonder? Could developing a plugin/extension infrastructure for Bonsai, be the answer, i wonder?
I wonder if we could just leverage the existing Blender platform, and maybe name them consistently with some common keyword or prefix ("Bonsai" or "BIM") to "namespace" them.
The extensions system also supports adding custom repositories, not sure how much work maintaining one would be. Has the advantage of grouping them together and maintain them easily, potentially at the expense of visibility.
Maybe when installing Bonsai, the addon could set up a dedicated repository of BIM related extensions for the user.
I possible proposal could be... since you say that these plugins work for blender as well just create a single addon where all these are captured. It could be hosted in github with automatic updated (very much like bonsai or bonsaiPR) so just updating this single addon will get all these goodies updated (maybe an N panel entry to centralize gui?)
Cheers!