set the view centered on an object

Question

I'm new to blender and I'm not sure how to approach the problem. I like to work with orthogonal views; I created a scene with a penguin, and the penguin is now facing an arbitrary direction. However, I now need to fix the penguin's shoulders which are too big.

I wish I could find a way to get some orthogonal views centered on my penguin (which has a mirror mode by the way) because I have a hard time editing the penguin using a non orthogonal view. I did not found a way to set such custom view, so for now my workflow is to memorize the penguin's rotation values, then turn the penguin back to 0,0,0, then update, and finally re-rotate the penguin back to the desired angle.

It works fine, but I wonder if there is a better approach to this problem ?

Answer 1

This seems like a job for the basic view tools which are hotkeyed by default to the numpad.

Just have a single large polygon with the same orientation as your model and then select it when you want to re-adjust your view press Shift + NumPad 7, Shift + NumPad 3 or Shift + NumPad 1