In this lesson video, we are going to discuss how we can navigate the 3d viewport using the UI buttons, and then using only the keyboard shortcuts. Although using a mouse is the fastest way, and my preferred method of navigating the 3d viewport, but you may experience situations where you cannot use a three button mouse. Perhaps you need to work mobile, but your mouse is broken or you accidentally left your mouse at home. So you are forced to use your laptop's trackpad. For example, let's discuss how to navigate using the UI button first, and then later using the keyboard shortcuts. Since Blender version 2.8, we have UI elements in the 3d viewport that we can use for navigation.
Let's start with viewport rotation. To rotate around the viewport, we can move our mouse cursor at this area that has colorful small circles and then Just drag around. As we can see, as we drag around, the mouse cursor becomes hidden in the viewport we will rotate along our mouse movement. When we release the mouse, our mouse cursor is back at the exact location, we start dragging before. Okay, to zoom in and out the viewport, we can hover our mouse on top of this magnifying glass icon and then drag it up and down. Drag up to zoom closer and drag down to zoom further away.
The less navigation UI tool that we can use is pending. We can do this using the Next button that looks like a hand symbol, click drag on it, and as we can see, we can pan the viewport around. Okay, so we have all that we need to navigate the 3d viewport. But what about these two buttons? Well, this one is useful to switch the view to camera view mode. We will discuss about This more in depth in later section when we discuss rendering, this left mouse button is useful to switch the 3d viewport from perspective mode to orthographic mode back and forth.
In perspective mode, we just the default we have a vanishing points, we can see that these grid lines will converge or inter cross into a single point. If we switch the few to orthographic mode, all of these grid lines are perfectly parallel to one another. This failing system is also known as isometric. Of course, this is not realistic, but we often needed for a certain type of work. Next, we can also use the keyboard only to navigate the 3d viewport, but I wouldn't recommend this method at all as it is very limited in terms of the control. To do this, we can use the keys number 246 and eight in the numbers.
Number two and eight can be used to rotate the viewport vertically like this. This is number two, and this is number eight. And for number four and six, you might already guess it. Number four is rotating the viewport to the left, and number six is for rotating the viewport to the right. To zoom in and out the viewport, we can use the plus and the minus symbols in the numpad. And finally, to pan around the viewport, we can hold CTRL and then press number four and number six in a numpad.
This will pan the viewport horizontally. If we hold the Ctrl key and then press number two or number eight in the numpad. The viewport will pan vertically. So that is how you do viewport navigation using only the keyboard