- [Instructor] The other really important
viewport navigation tool
that you'll need all the time is orbit.
That allows you to tumble around the scene,
or around a selected object.
So with the perspective view active,
and a yellow border around that perspective view,
we can activate the orbit tool
in the navigation tool box.
It looks like a little planet Saturn.
And the tool tip says orbit subobject.
That means that if we wanted to, we could orbit
around some component of an object's
like a point or an edge.
But it works for objects as well,
or even orbiting around the center of the viewport.
So click on that button,
and the currently active view gets a yellow circle.
And if we click and drag in the center of that circle,
then we can tumble or orbit around the center of the scene.
We've got some boxes here on the left and right,
and top and bottom,
that allow us to orbit around the scene in just one axis.
So if we click here on the boxes on the left and right,
we can tumble or orbit around
without changing our elevation.
Likewise, if we click and drag on the boxes
at the top and bottom,
we can orbit around the world here,
basically performing kind of a complicated dolly or tilt,
but we're not actually panning left and right.
Now, if we click on the outside of the circle,
what we'll get is called a dutch tilt
or a canted angle.
And that's something that you only want by design.
Here, we've kind of got it by accident.
So we want to restore our view back to a level horizon line.
We don't want this Dutch tilt or canted angle.
So you might think that we could just use the undo tool.
We could just click on undo up here.
But if you try that, you'll find out it doesn't work.
What happened was it undid the last seen command.
It just so happened that I selected some object,
and now it's a undone that selection.
But this undo button up here doesn't work
for viewport navigation.
If you want to undo something like this canted angle,
you'll need to go into the viewport menus here.
So each viewport has a series of menus in the upper-left,
and we can click on the viewport label,
or it's name, in this case, perspective.
And here in our popup menu,
we can do things like choose a different viewport
for that panel.
Or we've got an undo buffer for viewport commands.
It says undo view rotate.
We choose that.
And it undoes the most recent viewport navigation command.
All right, so that's pretty important.
Now also, if we want to orbit or tumble,
if we do that in a perspective view,
it's pretty predictable.
We can orbit around the selected object.
For example, we could select something,
grab our select object tool,
and select something such as this chair.
Go back to our orbit tool,
and we're orbiting around that chair.
You can see it,
it stays in the same position on the screen,
and we're able to tumble or orbit around it.
But if we try to orbit in an orthographic view,
we may get some undesired results.
If I go over to the front viewport
and click and drag there,
I get what's called an axonometric projection.
This is a situation in which we're not really looking
in the front viewpoint anymore.
We've now arbitrarily rotated our viewpoint,
and even though it says orthographic up here,
we're no longer in a true orthographic view.
An orthographic view is one that is parallel
to the world grid, or the world coordinate axis.
We are in a 2D view here.
Objects are not foreshortened based upon perspective.
In other words, an object that's farther away
isn't drawn smaller on the screen.
And if I tumble around or orbit around here,
we can see we've got some windows.
We can go to our pan,
if you just make that a little bit easier to see.
Go back to orbit.
So these windows are different distances
from my current viewpoint,
but they're all drawn the same size on the screen.
That's because we're in a 2D axonometric view.
And additionally, the lines of the grid
never converged to vanishing point.
This is not a prospective view.
Again, it's an axonometric projection.
And this may be of some use to you,
but I never use it anymore.
So I actually want to send this back to the viewpoint
I had before.
And again, I can use the menus.
Go into the viewport label and choose undo view rotate.
I'll actually need to do that a few times.
So I'll use the keyboard shortcut.
The hotkey for that is shift + Z.
So just keep hitting shift + Z until we get back
to the view we had before.
Now, if you don't want to accidentally
ever get into that situation with an axonometric projection,
then you can go into the options, the preferences,
and just disable the ability to orbit
in an orthographic view.
That's done by going into customize,
customize user interface.
And in the mouse tab,
we have an option, lock orbit in orthographic view.
So we can enable that.
Close the customized user interface dialogue.
And now, we're not able to orbit
in an orthographic view any longer.
And I think that's a good idea
because that axonometric projection
really kind of is more trouble than it's worth.
All right, that's how to use the orbit tool,
and also how to undo viewport navigation operations.