A new viewing method is proposed to automatically produce good viewpoints, to implement the progressive investigation from global to local for a 3D model. With hierarchical skeletons, the method can efficiently manage the global features, local features and details, and guided by the skeletons, produce good viewpoints to view these features with the interrelations among them represented well. In this way, the mechanism for human beings to understand a 3D model is well fitted, and many views can be reduced for promoting the understanding efficiency, in comparison with interactive selection of views. By experiments, compared with the general way to recognize a model through interactive selection of views, the new method can reduce the watching time by more than half, and reduce the recognition errors significantly.