Viewing your model

Camera navigation never interrupts your work. With any tool active, at any moment, you can orbit, pan, or zoom, even halfway through drawing a line.

With the mouse

Action	Input
Orbit	Drag with the middle mouse button
Pan	Drag with the right mouse button
Zoom	Scroll wheel — zooms toward the cursor

Zooming follows the cursor, so point at what you want to get closer to and scroll. The camera has gentle inertia and clamps its distance between 0.1 m and 50 m from its target.

With the camera tools

If you’re on a trackpad or prefer left-button navigation, activate a dedicated camera tool — the left mouse button then drives the camera instead of the current tool:

• Orbit — press O, or Camera ▸ Orbit
• Pan — press H, or Camera ▸ Pan
• Zoom — press Z (drag up/down), or Camera ▸ Zoom. Hold Shift while dragging (or Shift-scroll) to change the field of view instead — see below.

While the Orbit tool is active, holding Shift temporarily pans instead, the same convention SketchUp users know.

When you’re done navigating, press Space to return to the Select tool (or the shortcut of whatever tool you were using).

Position Camera, Look Around, and Walk

These three walk you through a model at eye level instead of orbiting around it — useful for checking a doorway width, a sightline, or how a room actually feels to stand in.

• Camera ▸ Position Camera — click a point to stand there, at eye height, facing whatever direction you were already looking; drag instead to stand at the press point and look toward wherever you release. Either way, it hands off straight to Look Around so you can immediately look around from where you landed.
• Camera ▸ Look Around — drag to look around from a fixed spot, like turning your head; looking straight up or down is clamped short of true vertical so the view never flips.
• Camera ▸ Walk — drag up or down to walk forward or back, left or right to turn; hold Shift to strafe sideways and change height instead. Walk keeps you at a constant eye height above the ground plane; there’s no collision detection, so you can walk through geometry.

Eye height defaults to 1.68 m (SketchUp’s classic 5′6″) and is shared across all three: type a new height and press Enter in any of them, and it carries over to the others for the rest of the session. Esc returns to the Select tool from any of the three.

Parallel projection

Camera ▸ Parallel Projection switches between the normal perspective view and an orthographic (parallel) one, where parallel edges in the model stay parallel on screen instead of converging toward a vanishing point — useful for reading true proportions, or for a flat, technical-drawing look on a standard view. Toggling holds the view steady on whatever you’re currently looking at; toggle back and you’re exactly where you started. Everything else — orbiting, panning, snapping, the tool gizmos — works the same in either projection.

Field of view

There’s no separate Field of View command — it’s reachable only through the Zoom tool, in perspective.

While Zoom is active, the current field of view shows in the corner the whole time. The most direct way to change it is to hold Shift while dragging: drag up to narrow the view (a longer, more zoomed-in lens), drag down to widen it. Shift-scroll does the same thing in smaller steps. Whichever way you started the drag decides what it does for its whole length — starting a plain drag and pressing Shift partway through keeps dollying, and vice versa.

You can also type a value directly and press Enter: degrees (45 or 45deg) or a 35mm-equivalent focal length (50mm), if you’re used to thinking in camera lenses. Either way the corner shows both units, so you always know where you landed.

None of this does anything under Parallel Projection — a parallel view has no lens to speak of, so a Shift-drag there dollies like a plain one.

Zoom Window

Camera ▸ Zoom Window drags a rectangle over the part of the model you want to fill the screen, then returns you to the Select tool — a one-shot camera move, not a mode you have to remember to leave.

Standard views and framing

• The viewport’s top-left chips jump straight to Top, Iso, or Front.
• Camera ▸ Standard Views offers all seven: Top, Bottom, Front, Back, Left, Right, and Iso. All are also in the command palette (“Standard View: …”).

• Camera ▸ Zoom Extents (palette: “zoom to fit”) frames every visible thing in the model — solids and sketches alike (guides don’t count) — the fastest way back when you’ve orbited into a corner. Hew also zooms to fit on its own when a model is opened, and a small unit chosen on the welcome screen starts the blank view zoomed in to match.

Controlling what you see

• View ▸ Axes shows or hides the world axes.
• View ▸ Grid shows or hides the ground grid, independently of the axes. The ground is a virtual backdrop — it never hides your model, so a Bottom view sees the model straight through it, and geometry lying exactly on the ground stays visible.
• View ▸ Guides shows or hides all construction guides (see Precision, measurement, and guides). Hidden guides also stop participating in snapping.
• View ▸ Section Cut turns a placed section’s cut on or off (below); unlike the other three, it’s greyed out until you’ve placed one.
• The Outliner and Tags panels have per-object and per-tag visibility toggles (Organizing your model).
• Scenes save a whole view — camera, hidden objects and tags, section cut, and these toggles — and bring it back in one click (Scenes).
• When you double-click into a group, component, or object to edit it, the rest of the scene dims so your editing context is unmistakable. Press Esc to step back out one level.

Looking inside with a Section Plane

The Section Plane tool (Tools ▸ Section Plane) is a view aid, not a modeling operation: it clips away part of the model so you can look inside — check wall thickness, verify clearance between mating parts, spot a hidden void — without touching any geometry. It’s the opposite of Slice, which actually cuts a solid into two separate objects; a section plane changes only what the viewport draws. It is saved with the file as view state (like the camera, outside undo), and a Scene can capture it.

1. Activate the tool and click a face — the section plane is created coincident with, and normal to, that face, and becomes active immediately. Click empty ground instead for a horizontal section at ground level. The tool stays active so you can adjust the section right away; press Space to return to the Select tool when you’re done.
2. Everything on the back side of the plane disappears, and cut walls render from the inside, so wall thickness reads directly off the exposed edges (the cut itself isn’t filled in — there’s no solid cap).
3. The widget marking the plane reads mostly as an outline plus a small arrow along its normal — solid when the cut is active, dashed when it’s turned off — with enough fill to read as glass rather than empty space. It’s always sized to frame the whole visible model, from any angle, and grows automatically as you add geometry beyond its current edges.
4. Sweep the cut — with the Section Plane tool active, click the widget, then move the cursor to slide the plane along its own normal arrow through the model; click again to set it there (or type an exact distance and press Enter). This is the main way to inspect a design, front to back. Click a face instead to re-place the section somewhere new.
5. Turn it off without losing it — check View ▸ Section Cut (also in the command palette as “Section Cut”) to see the whole model again. The widget stays put, drawn dashed, ready to switch back on when you check the box again.
6. Remove it — with the Section Plane tool active, press Delete or Backspace. The model returns to whole.

Only one section plane exists at a time — placing a new one replaces whichever was there before. To keep several cuts of the same model, capture each in a Scene.

Reading the axes

The world axes use the conventional colors (X red, Y green, Z blue), drawn solid in the positive direction and dashed in the negative. Inference cues reuse these colors: when a drawing or move operation locks to an axis, the cue and preview take on that axis’s color. Hew is a Z-up application: “up” in your model is the blue axis.