OpenSCAD navigation through interior of model without zooming in?

Question

I'm creating an OpenSCAD model, and I wanted to inspect the intersection of objects in the interior of the model... how do I 'fly' through the model at normal zoom? Is there a way of doing that?

The only way I can see of moving about is right-click to translate, left-click to rotate, and zoom in and out. Is there a set of keyboard shortcuts that equate to "left", "right", "forward", "backward", "turn left", "turn right", "turn up", "turn down" that would allow flying through the model without zooming in?

I tried zooming in to move into the model, but then using left-click / scroll and right-click / scroll to move about becomes so sensitive that one quickly gets lost.

Answer 1

Another solution would be to make your model transparent. Transparency only works in the f5 render mode. It can be achieved with the color() function by specifying an alpha value. You might want to put what you want to make transparent in a render() block to avoid having a lot of artifacts an weird render properties like this :

color(alpha = 0.5)render()
difference(){
    cylinder(h=8, r=2, center = true);
    rotate([90, 0, 0])
    cylinder(h=4, r=1, center = true);
}

The render block makes the equivalent of an f6 render of the subtree so all its intersections a computed for real. This is useful because the f5 render doesn't do that and use rendering tricks instead. It's faster but doesn't work quite well with transparecy.

Answer 2

Fly animation can be achieved by using special variables like $vpt (for translate) and probably $vpr(if you need rotation) and $t(which increments from 0 to 1 in steps).

Linear flying is actually very easy:

some_translate_multiplier = 200;
$vpt = [$t*some_translate_multiplier, 0, 0];

OpenSCAD User manual