Introduction

To be able to work in the three-dimensional space that Blender uses, you must be able to change your viewpoint as well as the viewing direction of the scene. While we will describe the 3D Viewport editor, most of the other editors have similar functions. For example, it is possible to pan and zoom in the Image editor.

Tip

Some navigation tools require a middle mouse button or numpad. If you don’t have one of these, see the Keyboard and Mouse page of the manual to learn how to work around this.

Navigation Gizmo

The navigation gizmo can be found in the top right of the editor.

Navigation Gizmo (left) and Navigation Gizmo in camera view (right).
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../../../_images/editors_3dview_navigate_introduction_gizmo_camera_view.png

The Orbit gizmo at the top shows the current orientation of the view. Dragging it with LMB will orbit the view. Clicking any of the axis labels will align the view to that axis. Clicking the same axis again switches to the opposite side of that same axis.

The four buttons below the orbit gizmo do the following: