With the basic interface layout in mind, I want to now give you a quick tour of the navigation controls for getting around the viewport.
And something to keep in mind beforehand is most of the viewport navigation, by default, is done with two things,
and that is your middle mouse button for a three button mouse and the number pad on a full size keyboard.
If you don't have either of these things, don't worry because I'll show you some options to get around this here at the end of the video.
But first I want to give you a quick introduction to the default controls.
So by default, to orbit the viewport or rotate, it's middle click and drag, and just rotate around.
If we want to pan the view, it's hold down shift, middle click and drag, and then to zoom the view is using our scroll wheel, zooming in and zooming out.
Then we can also zoom in and out using the plus and minus keys on our keypad.
And we can go to direct views for top, front, right, left, back, bottom, etc. by using the number pad.
And seven is top, one is front, three is side, five toggles between orthographic and perspective, zero goes into camera view,
and then holding down control and using seven, one and three will go to the opposite side.
So control seven is bottom, control one is back, control three is left or right.
I always get the two mixed up.
But you can also directly switch between these two if you don't have a number pad, or if you don't want to use the option that I'm going to show you in a moment.
You can also of course access all of these views via the view menu.
So if you get onto the view menu, you can see we have camera, top, bottom, front, etc.
We also have cameras where we can set our active camera to the selected object.
And then we can toggle between view perspective, align the view, navigation, etc.
So all of our view options can then be found here.
So those are the basic controls.
But assuming for a moment that you're working on a laptop and maybe you don't have a three button mouse at hand and have to work with a track pad,
and maybe you don't have a number pad, then there's a couple of things you can do.
The first thing is to go into the file menu and then user preferences.
And in the user preferences, we're going to bounce over to the input section and enable two things.
The first thing is the Emulate three button mouse, which enables us to substitute alt and left mouse for the middle click.
And then we're also going to enable Emulate Numpad, which allows us to use the top row of one through zero keys for the viewport navigation.
Whereas by default, the one through zero keys at the top of your keyboard are used for switching layers.
So once these two are on, then you can hold down alt, left click and drag for orbiting, alt shift for panning.
And actually, one other thing that you can do for zooming is either using your number pad or if you hold down control alt, left click and drag,
and you can then zoom in and out by then dragging your mouse.
Those are two ways that you can get around using the number pad or a three button mouse.
And one last thing that I want to show you as far as navigation goes, by default,
Blender does not orbit around the selected object.
And so it's just globally orientating around all of the objects in your scene.
But many of us prefer to rotate around the selected object so as to better stay focused on what we're working on.
And to do this, you can go back over to the user preferences.
Under the interface section, you can just switch over and enable Rotate Around Selection.
And this will then immediately make the selected object the central pivot point for whatever you're rotating around.
And you can also enable zoom to mouse position if you wish, auto perspective and auto depth if those are your preference.
And then one last thing is also if you prefer trackball over turntable, you can set that in the input section.