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

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).

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 — the fastest way back when you’ve orbited into a corner.

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.
• The Outliner and Tags panels have per-object and per-tag visibility toggles (Organizing your model).
• 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.

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.