In this lesson video, we are going to discuss several viewport settings to make sure we have the best experience when navigating the 3d viewport. The first thing we are going to discuss is the navigation settings in the preference editor. So let's open the Edit menu preferences and open the navigation category in here, you want to make sure all of these three options are on. And also this one option zoom to mouse position, quick explanation about the settings. First is the orbit around selection. When this option is turned on, the viewport center of rotation will be at the location of our selected object.

This is helpful so that the viewport will not go astray and always have our selected object in frame. Second is the auto perspective. By default, it is on This is the reason why when we switch from user to any access few points such as top or right or from view, the viewport automatically change to orthographic. Vice versa. If we go back from access few points to user a few, it will automatically change to perspective. Third is the Autodesk basically, if this is on Blender will detect the depth of the object surfaces beneath the mouse cursor and use that for reference.

Okay, you might be asking reference to what the answer is the next option which is zoom to mouse position. When this option is enabled, the mouse pointer position becomes the focus point of zooming instead of the viewport center. Now with the auto dip option turned on, Blender will be smart enough to sense The 3d surface under our mouse pointer so that the zooming process become more precise. The next setting we want to look at is the viewport quality. If you already have the preferences editor open like this, just go to the viewport category in here, you will see quality section, I am setting all of these values to no or none. And finally, I said this edit mode, smooth wires to have also, all of these settings determine how much anti aliasing effects will be applied in the viewport.

If you don't know what anti aliasing is, essentially, it is a rendering technique to make Jaeger pixels look smoother by adding extra semi transparent pixels around objects border or lines. This will make the viewport looks better visually but at the cost of performance. If you have fast high end GPU, and you want to enjoy extra smoothness, in the viewport, you may want to lift the settings to the default for me, because mostly, I don't actually need anti aliasing in the viewport. And also, because I have my screen recording running in the background, I prefer to have maximum performance out of blender. That is why I turn off all of the settings. If we place our mouse cursor inside the 3d viewport, and then press n to open the sidebar, we can see in the view section, we have these parameters, focal length, clip, start and clip end.

These default values are already good. So for more situation, you don't really need to change them, but you may need to change them later in the future. So let's discuss each of these parameters one by one, the focal length value, determine how wide the viewing angle of our viewport it works. Just like how camera lens works in the real world. That is why it is measured in lens millimeter value. If you are not familiar with photography, don't worry, basically, the higher the focal length value, the narrower the viewing angle, the scaling of the perspective effect.

The lower this value, the wider the feeling angle, so we get to see more objects in frame, but the perspective distortion will become stronger. Again, for most cases, this default value which is 50 millimeter already fine. Next is the clip start and the clip and values. These values are very useful when we have a very complex scene and we want to reduce viewport workloads and maintain workable performance. Essentially, these clipping values will avoid the viewport to display anything that are further away from the clip and values and anything that are coming Closer than the clip start value to see these values in action. If we use a very low value in a clip n, like 20 meter for example, we can see everything beyond this distance will be invisible, even the grid becomes invisible.

If we drag the slider even smaller, we start to see the cube get cut off. We can see the same thing happen if we increase the clip start value in here, the front cube area will get cut off. I'm pretty sure you get the idea. To reset this to the default value, simply right click on it and just be set to default value