Typing "Using the camera in the construction kit for skyrim" in Google won't really give me the results I'm looking for as is expected. I'm having difficulty using the camera in the CK. Once I'm looking at the Render View it says "Free Camera, perspective" and I notice I have to hold shift and move the mouse to move around.

The issue I have is that the functionality appears to change randomly. Sometimes I pivot in an XYZ axis around the selected object, and sometimes the entire From, Building and all pans around without selecting anything new or using a different key press. I notice there isn't any different functionality for ALT and CTRL.

Looking at the hotkeys I see Y changes the Camera view, but I want to change the SHIFT+Mouse behavior so that's not it. I looked through the hotkeys and I just don't see an option to force the camera to pivot the view around the selected object, or Pan the entire view independently without waiting for the CK to randomly decide to do so.

How is this normally done?

I've spent hours looking, and I don't think you can change it...

Thanks for looking. I wonder how I can make a feature request for this.

Yes, it would be nice. But I probably have like 50+ feature requests and other people probably do too...

Well, I can tell you what helps me when using the camera. The biggest problem I have is rotating and panning in exterior cells. These settings help some:

1) Set grids to load very high, at least 20 and preferrably 40+ and disable cell loading in the render window. This will prevent you from loading new cells when you move the camera, which makes the camera movement a lot faster and smoother. And with grids to load at 20+, you'll be able to see a lot at once, so you'll rarely need to load more cells. If you need to, just enable cell loading for a second in the area you want, then disable again.

2) Use the terrain editor (the key is H) to move the camera between locations. The pivot will always be the terrain editing brush location, so you don't have to be confused about where the camera pivot is.

3) If you select an object, there's a key that moves the camera pivot to that object and moves the camera itself to be a certain distance from the object. I forgot what it is, but it basically works like the top view key, without rotating the camera to top view. Maybe you know about this already though.

4) Disable fog for exteriors and enable distant LOD, and edit with the sky enabled. I know this isn't actually camera-related, but it makes everything much easier to see, which helps.

For interiors, I'm not really sure because I haven't edited them very much. Hopefully this helps for exteriors though, if you are editing those...

Shift + f
Very handy shortcut

Maybe its just me but sometimes I have to select a object 2 times before it properly "clips" the camera and rotates around it nicely.