In this video, we are going to learn how to navigate the 3d viewport. If you are doing anything that is related to 3d, such as 3d modeling, texturing, animation, etc. Then 3d viewport will be the editor where you do most of your work in render. There is why it is the first editor we need to cover before anything else. Okay. When we start Blender The first time you will have these three objects available inside your scene, we are going to remove these three objects and then create a monkey head object instead.
Why? Because we need something in the viewport that has a sense of direction to practice the navigation. To select all of the objects in the scene, just press a letter key after that, to delete them. We can press X letter key and then just delete in here. Now our scene is empty next Let's click on this Add Menu button to smash then choose monkey in here. I know we haven't talked about object creation yet, but just bear with me for now.
Okay, to rotate around the 3d viewport, we can press and hold the middle mouse button and then just drag around. Now you must remember that we are not actually rotating our object in here. The object in our scene is unchanged. We simply rotate around on how we see the object. Now, some of you might ask, Hey, I don't have a middle button in my mouse, how can I rotate my viewport then? Well, if you use standard mouse with a scroll wheel, you actually have a middle mouse button, simply click down on the scroll wheel, and that will be a middle mouse button click but if you have some kind of fancy touch mouse like the April Magic Mouse, unfortunately, they don't have Have a middle button.
So you need to work around this limitation by using additional keyboard shortcuts, or use different methods of navigation which we are going to cover in later lessons. But anyway, if you are planning to learn blender or any 3d software in general, you better invest on a good mouse with middle button s blender and also other 3d software that I know of such as 3ds, Max, Maya, etc. They all use middle mouse button extensively for a viewport navigation. Yes, you can use other methods for navigation, but using mouse is by far the fastest way to navigate the viewport. So this should be your priority before the other methods. Okay, next, to zoom in and out the viewport.
You can use the mouse scroll wheel, scroll up to zoom in and scroll down to zoom out. Now when Zooming with the scroll wheel, we get these steps motion. If you don't want this step effect, meaning you want to zoom in and out smoothly, then you can use the other method and that will be holding the Ctrl key and then hold the middle mouse button and drag the mouse up and down. As we can see, the zooming motion is now smooth and not stepped as before. The next navigation control that we want to cover is to pan or to drag around the 3d viewport. We can pan around the viewport by holding the Shift key and then press the middle mouse button and just move the mouse around to pan the viewport.
Okay guys, so that is how we can navigate the 3d viewport using the mouse. I strongly suggest that you memorize and practice this navigation technique before moving on as this is very very important when working with 3d in Blender