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Navigating in 3D Space

Description

Blender lets you work in three-dimensional space, but our monitor screens are only two-dimensional. To be able to work in three dimensions, you must be able to change your viewpoint as well as the viewing direction of the scene. This is possible in all of the 3D Viewports. While we will describe the 3D Viewport Window, most other windows use an equivalent series of functions. For example, it is possible to translate and zoom a Buttons Window and its Panels.

Mouse Buttons and Numpad: If you have a mouse with less than three buttons or a keyboard without numpad, please refer to the Keyboard and Mouse page of the manual to learn how to use Blender with them.

Rotating the View

Description

Blender provides four default viewing directions: Side, Front, Top and Camera view. Blender uses a right-angled "Cartesian" coordinate system with the Z axis pointing upwards, "side" corresponds to looking along the X axis, in the negative direction; "front" along the Y axis; and "top" along the Z axis; The Camera view shows the current scene as seen from the Camera view point.

Options

You can select the viewing direction for a 3D Viewport with the View Menu entries (A 3D Viewport's view menu.) or by pressing the hotkeys 3 NumPad for "side", 1 NumPad for "front", 7 NumPad for "top". You can select the opposite directions if you hold Ctrl while using the same numpad shortcuts. Finally 0 NumPad gives access to the "Camera" viewpoint.

Hotkeys Remember that most hotkeys affect the window that has focus, so check that the mouse cursor is in the area you want to work in before your use the hotkeys!

Apart from these four default directions, the view can be rotated to any angle you wish. Click and drag MMB on the Viewport's area: If you start in the middle of the window and move up and down or left and right, the view is rotated around the middle of the window. Alternatively, you can press and hold Alt while dragging LMB in the Viewport's area. To change the viewing angle in discrete steps, use 8 NumPad and 2 NumPad (which correspond to vertical MMB dragging, from any viewpoint), or use 4 NumPad and 6 NumPad to rotate the scene on the XY plane only.

TrackBall/Turntable

By default, when you rotate the view as described in The viewing direction (rotating) section, you are rotating the scene as though you are rolling your hand across a "Trackball". For some users this is intuitive and for others it is not. If you feel you are having difficulties with this style of 3D window rotation you can switch to the "Turntable" style.

The "Turntable" style is fasioned more like a record player where you have two axes of rotation available and the world seems to have a better definition of what is "Up" and "Down" in the world. The downside to using the "Turntable" style is that you lose some flexibility when working with your objects. However, you gain the sense of "Up" and "Down" which can help if you are feeling disoriented. Of course you can always switch between the styles depending on what you are working on.

To change the rotation "Style" use the User Preferences Window; remember to pull the main window down because only the header shows by default. Click on the "View & Control" button to reveal a page of buttons relating to Views and Control functionality. You will see an area for choosing the "View rotation:", see (View rotation). There are two additional buttons for controlling the display in the 3D window. "Auto Perspective" will automatically switch to Perspective whenever the view is rotated using MMB . "Around Selection" will rotate the view around the center of the current selection. If there is no selection at that moment (ex. if you used A to deselect everything) the last selection will be used anyway.

Panning the View

Description

To pan the view, hold down ⇧ Shift and drag MMB in the 3D Viewport. For discrete steps, use the hotkeys Ctrl8 NumPad, Ctrl2 NumPad, Ctrl4 NumPad and Ctrl6 NumPad as with rotating. For those without a middle mouse button, you can hold ⇧ Shift Alt while dragging with LMB . The behavior of the MMB can be customized, in the Preference window, View & Control tab, so it will pan by default and ⇧ ShiftMMB will rotate the view.

Zooming the View

Description

You can zoom in and out by holding down Ctrl and dragging MMB . The hotkeys are + NumPad and - NumPad. The View>>Viewport Navigation sub-menu holds these functions too; see (A 3D Viewport's view menu).

If you have a wheel mouse, you can perform all of the actions that you would do with + NumPad and - NumPad by rotating the wheel (Wheel ). Since the Buttons window has so many panels, rotating the mouse wheel pans the window left and right in horizontal view. This allows you to pan to the panel you need in a narrow or smaller display, or if the window is narrow. As an alternative, you can easily display the Buttons window vertically; the panels will be arranged top to bottom.

If you have neither a wheel mouse nor a middle mouse button, you can easily zoom in and out with Ctrl Alt LMB .

If You Get Lost... If you get lost in 3D space, which is not uncommon, two hotkeys will help you: ↖ Home changes the view so that you can see all objects (View>>Frame All Menu entry,) while . NumPad zooms the view to the currently selected objects (View>>Frame Selected Menu entry)