Here we start to take a look at the viewport and navigation in 3D space. It may be a bit different from other softwares in the 3D industry, however when you get a feel for how blenders navigation works you will fly through the viewport. Watch this video to get a head start or read on below. Perhaps both.
The previous part about editos and interface guided us through a common beginner misstake that usually ends up in a very messy interface. So make sure to watch that if you haven't.
The 3D viewport is the name of the largest editor, that happens to represent the 3D world. To navigate around the 3D viewport, use the middle mouse button. Click and hold to rotate the view.
To zoom the view ether, scroll the wheel on your mouse or hold control while pressing down the middle mouse button.
For panning the view, hold shift, click and hold the middle mouse button.
The 3D view supports both perspective view and orthographic view. In perspective view we view the 3D world as we normally do with perspective. The opposite of that is orthographic view. It lacks perspective and looks more like a blueprint view. Orthographic view is most useful when viewing an object from a head on angle. For instance, precisely from the top, left or bottom view.
To view the object in any of these modes use the number pad. Press 1 for front orthographic view. 3 for right view and 7 for top view. Hold ctrl while pressing 1, 3 or 7 for back, left and bottom view.
When going into any of these views Blender will toggle orthographic view automatically. To manually toggle between perspective and orthographic view press numpad 5. This was very common in older versions of Blender but in 2.8 we don’t need to worry so much about it since we get the automatic toggle while using 1,3 and 7 now.
A new feature in Blender 2.8 is that you can toggle between the top front right view etc., just by holding alt, middle mouse button and drag left, right, up or down to move between the orthographic head on views.