Transcription
[Music] The first thing that you'll need to learn to work in 3D is how to navigate 3D space. The interface of the default Blender file is arranged into four editors. For now, though, let's just focus on the big one right in the middle. That's the 3D view. As you can imagine, this is where most of your work is going to take place.
There are several different navigation methods, which I'll explain in this video, but don't feel like you have to use or memorize all of them. Just pick whichever one is the most comfortable for you and go with that. The first and most most obvious one is with the gizmos in the top right of the 3D view. If we left click and drag on the magnifier icon and move our mouse up and down, then we can zoom in and out. If we left click and drag on the hand icon, then we can pan the view around. Beneath that, we have icons for toggling ourselves in and out of camera view, though we don't need to worry about that for now. And there's also a grid icon for turning on and off perspective distortion. When distortion is off, that's called orthographic view. That's not something we need to worry about too much for now, though you will see that term come back later in this video.
What we really want to do as 3D artists, though, is rotate around the view. For that, you can hover over the XYZ axes up here, left click and drag. Practice dragging left and right and up and down. Now, navigating this way is pretty handy and easy to remember, but it's not super convenient when you're working because moving your mouse to the top right of the view all the time is just too much work. So instead, let's practice how to navigate using the mouse.
First, I'll explain how to do this with a three-button mouse, which is one that has a left click, a right click, and a middle click, which is usually the scroll wheel. If you plan on working in Blender for a good amount of time, I would highly recommend getting a three-button mouse, though if you don't have one, don't worry. I'll explain other navigation methods in just a second. But if you do have a three-button mouse, go ahead and just scroll up and down on the scroll wheel. That'll zoom you in and out. Then hold down the middle mouse button and move your mouse around. That's going to orbit your view. Next, hold down shift and then hold down the middle mouse button. Move your mouse around, and that will shift your view around. And then lastly, if you hold down control and then middle mouse button drag your mouse up and down, then you can smoothly zoom in and out. Again, that's middle mouse button and drag in order to orbit the view, shift middle mouse button and drag in order to shift or pan the view around, and then control middle mouse button and drag in order to zoom in and out, or just zoom with your scroll wheel.
If you happen to be using Blender on a MacBook or a Windows laptop with a Precision touchpad, then you can also use touch gestures in order to navigate the 3D view. For that, drag with two fingers in order to orbit around the view. Hold down shift and drag with two fingers in order to pan around the view. Pinch in and out to zoom, or you can use that two fingers again. Hold down control and zoom in and out that way as well.
Now, if you're using a pen and tablet with Blender, or a mouse that does not have a middle click, then we need to head into preferences in order to enable that for navigation. So let's go to the Edit menu, down to Preferences, go to Input, not Navigation, but Input, and turn on Emulate Three Button Mouse. This will allow the hotkey Alt Left Click to act as a middle mouse button in Blender. So now, with that on, I can go ahead and hold down Alt Left Click and drag in order to rotate around the view. Again, that's just as if it was a middle click. Then I can Alt Shift Left Click in order to shift or pan around the view, and then Alt Control Click in order to zoom in and out. Again, this is really helpful if you're using something like a drawing tablet. For now, though, I'll go ahead and turn this option off just so I'm back to the default preferences.
While practicing all this navigation, it's pretty easy to get lost. Maybe you're way off to the side or even upside down. At first, it might be a little disorienting before you get used to it. So there are a couple of options that you might want to know. First, let's go to the View menu and choose Frame Selected. That'll jump our view right to the selected object. Now, you might have clicked off to the side and there might not be any selected object, and we'll talk about selection a lot more in the next video. So if that's the case, go ahead and go to View and Frame All, and that'll frame your view around every object that's in the scene. The hotkey for that is really helpful to know. That's the Home button, and you can think about it as if you're way off and lost in the woods, to get home, you just press the Home button.
All right, now to jump you right side up, then what you'll want to do is go into front view. Let's go to View, Viewpoint, and choose Front View. There we go. Now I'm right side up. You'll notice that as I went into front view, or if I go into any one of these others like top view or side view, then all perspective distortion is gone, and I'm getting this extra grid from the side. This is what I mentioned before as orthographic view, and we can see that over in the top left of the 3D view. It says we're in Right Orthographic. I can also jump to any of these straight-on orthographic views by clicking the axis in our navigation gizmo up here on the top right. Let's say I want to go into front view, then I can click on the negative Y. That's jumped me into front orthographic. For side view, I can click on the X, or for top view, I can click on the Z. As soon as I rotate the view, it'll pop me right back into perspective.
If you happen to have a number pad, you'll find it really helpful for navigating Blender. If we go to View and Viewpoint, you'll notice that all of these options have number pad hotkeys. The ones you need to remember are 1, 3, and 7. One for front view, three for side, and seven for top. So let's hit one on the number pad to go into front view, three for side, and seven for top. You can also use zero for jumping in and out of the camera view, or Number Pad Period to zoom to the selected object if you have an object selected.
If you don't have a number pad, then you can instead use the Tilda key, which is the tick mark/squiggly line on the top left of the US keyboard. On some other keyboards, like the German keyboard, it's not the Tilda, but it is the one right below the Escape key. Hit that, and you'll get the View Pie menu, where you can jump into top, front, back, right, left, bottom, or any one of these other views from there. You can also view selected, just in case you get lost.
Now, if you don't have a number pad and you don't have a Tilda key, then you can still navigate around with your keyboard by going to Edit and Preferences again, to Input, just above where we turned on Emulate Three Button Mouse, go up to the Keyboard section and turn on Emulate Numpad. That'll use your top row of keys as the number pad input. So if we hit one again, that'll be for front view, three will be for side view, and seven will be for top view. We can also use five, which I forgot to mention, to toggle from perspective to orthographic view. But the top row of numbers is used for other things throughout Blender, so I generally don't like to have this on. I'd only recommend having it on if you absolutely need it. I'll go ahead and turn that off for now.
And I think that's enough talk about navigation. We've covered a lot of different input methods here, and I'd like you to give them all at least one try. Then stick with whichever one you like best. Once you practice that a bit and can navigate around the 3D view with ease, head on to the next lesson, and we'll talk about selection.
[Music] Oh. [Music]