Navigating the 3D viewport - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

- [Instructor] We're now going to talk about, how we navigate the 3D view port. It's a core concept for you to grasp when you're creating 3D scenes, you're going to want to look around them and inspect them. Now we're looking through a default camera which we can see up here. This camera has a perspective projection. We can come over to our camera's menu and change the projection if we like. But we'll keep it on perspective for now. To navigate this scene, I'm going to use the one, two, three method. So, holding down one on my keyboard, left click and drag, I can move. If I hold down two, left click and drag, I can dolly. And if I hold down three and left click and drag, I will orbit around the scene. There's an alternative method, so, if you hold down alt, left click and drag, you'll actually orbit. If you keep that alt button or option on a Mac, if you keep that held down right click, you will dolly and keeping option or alt held down, middle mouse click. This will allow you to move. The third way of navigating is to come up here and move with the hand icon here. Dolly with this one and orbit with this one. Now these are a lot slower and a bit less accurate in my view, but they are there for you if you need them. So choose a method that you like and go with that. I'm going to stick with my one, two, three for now. And so, if we just move this around, sort of move in, and I'm going to click and drag. Now, what I did was I hovered my mouse over a corner here, held down three, and left click and dragged. And you can see where the cursor is, that's where I'm orbiting around. Now, with my mouse quite close. And just moving it nicely like this, I have a lot of control. And if my mouse is out here, I can start to maybe lose a bit of control. So the further away I am, I can lose that control. Now, if I get closer to the object it becomes a lot easier to control, and you can suddenly find yourself, if you're making wild movements, you can find yourself kind of not sure where you are, and you could be upside down. And this can feel like a bit of a mistake. And you might be thinking, how do I get back to just where it was? I just want to undo this. You know, mistakes in computer software, you want to reach for an undo button, well, you can actually undo the view by coming over to the view menu and choosing undo view. And I highly recommend that you learn these two keyboard shortcuts, control or command shift Z for undoing the view, and to redo the view control or command shift and Y. So let's try that. We'll hold down command, shift, and press Z a couple of times, and you can see we can really get back to where we were if you just press it a few more times. Now, if you wanted to redo the view control or command shift Y. And this will start replaying some of those camera moves that we did. These are very useful keyboard shortcuts. If you wanted to get back to the default view of the camera, just choose view and frame default. And that gets us back there. We're currently viewing this scene through our default camera, and it has a perspective projection, and we've already seen that there are different projections that can be used. There are also different views for our 3D scene. You don't necessarily want to see everything in perspective all the time. So if you come over to this fourth button here, this is the all views. And what we could do is just click this or middle mouse click or use the keyboard shortcut F5. If you come into the panel menu, you can see that all views is F5, and these are the other keyboard shortcuts that will allow you to maximize one of these quadrants. So you can press F1 to get back to the perspective view. For a middle mouse click, I'll actually get back to the all views and you can actually middle mouse click into another view as well. Now these wire frames that you see here, this is a wire frame of the cube, but we are looking at the cube from various projections. You can see in the top left corner we have a top projection, right projection, and front projection. You can change the display of these to say gouraud shading. And you can see that we can actually now pick up the textures here, but it's actually more useful in most cases just to see the lines. It allows you to clearly see the geometry of your scene. Now we are viewing the scene from various planes. So this top one is the XZ plane. The right view is the YZ plane, which you can see in this axis in the top right corner. And the front is the XY plane. So we'll come back to our perspective view by middle mouse clicking, hovering our mouse over the perspective view and middle mouse clicking. And I want you to come into this other file and use it to get comfortable navigating in Cinema 4D. So again, choose a method that you are comfortable with, whether that's one, two, three, or alt. And you can start to navigate into this scene and orbit around and have a look at a good inspection of the cube. And then move on. Take a look at this sphere, come out, come round, and just navigate around finding, you know, various views that you like. And you can also come in and practice undoing the view. Remember those keyboard shortcuts. And these will get you back to where you started. Now almost, you almost want to, you know, have one hand hovering over the keyboard when you're navigating, but you don't want to be looking at the keyboard. You want to be looking at the view port, so that your fingers are doing the keyboard shortcut. And this just becomes second nature. And once you become very comfortable with that, working in a 3D program just feels a lot more intuitive. So use this scene to practice that method, and when you're comfortable with that, we'll move on, and talk about something else