I've altered the layout slightly to show this little keystroke visualizer app that I'm running
which for this video and for more down the line will hopefully keep a record of everything
pressed.
I'll be explaining as thoroughly as I can so that you don't actually need to look down
there but it's there just in case anyway.
So let's move our user perspective camera around and get to grips with navigating.
I know it's the user perspective camera just because in the top left of the 3D view you
can see it says user persp.
We can also get orthographic views as well which we'll take a look at in a moment.
So all of the main navigation actions require the middle mouse button.
So to rotate we just need the middle mouse button on its own.
So if we just do that you can see I'm rotating around the scene.
To pan we just need to hold down shift and middle mouse button and now we can see we're
panning across the scene.
And then to zoom in we can just hold down control and then middle mouse button and then
slide upwards like that and then downwards to sort of pull away.
You can also use the middle mouse wheel to scroll in and out of an object as well.
This is something I find myself doing quite a bit.
So let's take a look at some of the other viewing angles that we can take on this object.
So we're already looking through the user perspective view as we pointed out before
but how about some other views.
So let's take a look at the front view for example and to do that all I did was press
number one on the numpad.
So all of the hotkeys here we're going to find are in the numpad area.
So number one on the numpad takes you to the front view and if you hold down control and
then number one on the numpad it'll take you to the opposite of that.
So instead of the front we're now at the back and if we press three on the numpad it'll
take us to the right.
And if we hold control and three then we get the left.
And then seven for the top and then control seven and we get the bottom.
And you can see that a lot of those views are pretty much more familiarly seen in orthographic
mode but we're still in perspective mode.
If we want to change that we can press five on the numpad and that will toggle us through.
So right now we're looking at the right orthographic mode and if we hold shift and middle mouse
we can sort of pan around the view.
If we just middle mouse and click we will see ourselves in more of a 3D view but we're
still in orthographic mode so we don't get any foreshortening and basically zero perspective.
All of these hotkeys that I'm using you can actually find down in the footer area of the
3D view and you can see we've got the view menu if we click on that you can see them
all down here.
This is what we've basically just been covering.
A couple of other things that I wanted to point out is just to be able to view something.
So if I actually just scroll the middle mouse wheel to just zoom out a little bit I'm going
to right click on this lamp and if I want to view it I can just press the full stop
or the period key on the numpad and that will zoom you right into it and then if I middle
click around here we can see the rest of the scene.
I'm just going to press five to just move that into a perspective view though so I don't
get too lost and then if I just want to right click onto here to view this and then we can
press period on the numpad again and then we can basically zoom right into that.
If we want to be able to see everything in the scene we can also use just the home key.
So I've built this pretty basic scene to give us something to show the benefits of another
way in which we can navigate through our scene.
This is the fly mode and we can jump into this by going shift F and then once we do
that we can use WAS and D on the keyboard to sort of move around and then using the
mouse we can kind of rotate our vision so it's kind of similar to an FPS game in that
way or at least in this point we're actually just sort of flying around and to actually
increase and decrease the speed you can use the mouse wheel.
I'm just scrolling through there.
We can also go up and down by going Q to go down and then E to go up and in fact if you
look in the details of the header bar which is actually at the bottom of the 3D view at
the moment you can see all the various different options there and you'll notice that happens
for several tools in Blender so if you're looking for some hints sometimes you'll find
them there and you can see it starts off with LMB for left mouse button return to confirm,
escape right mouse button to cancel and then tab for gravity.
Now this is pretty much the most interesting thing that I wanted to kind of convey on this
map that I've built here.
It doesn't really make much sense this by the way it's just something to move around
in so if we press tab we kind of create gravity and also it sort of naturally it Blender works
out what surfaces to kind of give some basic collision to so we can now walk on the floor.
It's not given anything like this a collision we can just sort of pass straight through
but this is pretty cool nonetheless so you can pretty very quickly get something going
for a first person map of some kind and really almost as soon as you finish modeling you
can kind of roam around in it.
The only other thing I'd like to mention right now regarding navigating and getting around
the view is jumping back and forth between a typical quad view.
So quad view is a view which gives you a perspective camera and three orthographic views all within
the same 3D view and we can get to it by using the shortcut control alt and Q and you can
see we get the user perspective camera over here and we've also got a right orthographic
mode here and then we've also got the front orthographic and the top orthographic and
if we just go control alt and Q again we can return back to our previous main view.
We can also find that option within our view menu just near the top toggle quad view and
if we open up our property sidebar with the N key you can find it down near the bottom
here as well toggle quad view.
Also you'll spot an extra couple of options to customize slightly how they behave and
relate to each other.
So that should wrap things up for the basics on navigating around Blender's 3D view.