Moving around the viewport
How to orbit, pan, zoom, and frame your work on desktop and touch, plus camera bookmarks, view presets, and render modes.
Open in the interactive manual →The interactive version has full-text search, a table of contents, and light/dark themes.
Knowing how to look around is the difference between fighting the editor and flowing through it. The single most important rule on desktop: a plain left-drag selects; hold Alt to move the camera.
Desktop camera controls
| Action | Input |
|---|---|
| Orbit (turn around the scene) | Alt + left-drag |
| Pan (slide the view) | Alt + middle-drag |
| Zoom (dolly in/out) | Mouse wheel, or Alt + right-drag |
The wheel zooms at any time, so most of the time you'll orbit with Alt+drag and zoom with the wheel and never think about it again.
You don't have to memorize the table, either. On a mouse-and-keyboard machine the editor's status bar spells out all four combos (Alt+drag Orbit · Alt+middle Pan · Alt+right Dolly · Wheel Zoom) along the bottom of the window, so the reminder is on screen rather than in a first-run card you dismissed weeks ago. The bar is off by default to keep the viewport clear: switch it on in Settings ▸ Editor UI ▸ Show status bar, where it also reports the selected object, the active transform tool, the snap toggle, and when the scene was last updated.
Camera buttons: no modifier needed
If holding Alt feels like a lot to remember, the Tools rail has a small camera group under the Move/Rotate/Scale buttons:
| Button | Then, in the viewport… |
|---|---|
| Tumble | A plain left-drag orbits the camera. |
| Pan | A plain left-drag slides the view. |
| Dolly | A plain left-drag up or down zooms in and out. |
Click a button to arm that mode (the cursor changes to match) and click it again to turn it off and hand plain left-drag back to selecting. Only one camera mode is active at a time, and Alt+drag keeps working exactly as before either way. This is a desktop convenience: on a touch screen the camera never needed a modifier in the first place, so the buttons don't appear.
Touch controls
- One finger drags to orbit.
- Two fingers pan and pinch-zoom.
On mobile you can also switch to dual virtual joysticks (a "Move" stick on the left and a "Look" stick on the right) in Settings ▸ Mobile & Touch. Visitors to your published scenes get the same option. The third mode there, guided scroll, turns a swipe up into "next section" for multi-page scenes, worth knowing about when you're deciding how visitors should move through the finished site.
The same group tunes how the sticks behave: separate pan and look speed multipliers, an invert look Y-axis toggle for people who prefer classic FPS controls, and a joystick opacity slider. The sticks sit over your scene for a visitor's whole visit, so they're drawn at half strength by default, readable as controls without competing with the content. Push it toward 1 if you'd rather they were unmissable. (It won't go all the way to 0: an invisible pad would still swallow taps.)
The speeds multiply a baseline tuned for a thumb on a phone, and the stick's own response is shaped for aiming rather than sprinting: a resting thumb reads as a standstill, the first part of the throw is gentler than the last so small corrections stay small, and there's no step at the edge of the dead zone. Pushing and letting go both ramp over the same short window (measured in real time, so a 120 Hz phone and a 60 Hz one feel like the same rig), which is why a released stick coasts to a stop instead of cutting out.
Frame what you're working on
Press F to frame the selection: the camera flies over and re-centers on whatever you've selected. It's the fastest way to recover when you've orbited off into space. (No selection? It frames the whole scene.) You'll find it in the Camera menu too.
Saved views (camera bookmarks)
You get four bookmark slots for camera angles you want to return to:
- Save the current view to a slot: Shift+1 through Shift+4.
- Jump to a saved view: 1 through 4.
They're also in the Camera menu as "View 1–4". Bookmarks are remembered in your browser. (These are your working viewpoints, different from camera objects, which define what your visitors see.)
Step back through views
The editor keeps a running history of where your camera has been: think "undo, but just for the view." Press [ to step back to your previous vantage point and ] to step forward again. It's the quick way to return to where you were after orbiting off to check something. (These keys only move the camera in normal object mode; inside poly edit mode they grow and shrink the selection instead.)
View presets and projection
The Camera menu also offers snap-to angles (Top, Front, Side) and a toggle between Perspective and Orthographic projection. Ortho is handy for lining things up precisely without perspective distortion.
Render modes
Under Viewport ▸ Render, switch how the scene draws while you work:
These only change your editing view, never the published result. (Entering poly edit mode flips to Wire automatically and restores your choice when you leave.)