Using 3D Navigation in Maya

Video Transcript

"Hey everybody! My name is Matt and I'm speaking to you on behalf of Expert Village. Navigation and 3D can be a little confusing at first. Once you get used to it and practice with it for a little while, it'll become like second nature to you. I'm working on a Mac. If you are too, you're probably going to want to get a mouse with 3 buttons on it, or else you're going to be hitting 2 or 3 buttons just to move around it or else you're going to be hitting 2 or 3 buttons at the same time just to move around. If you hold down the alt button or you can also hold down the command button if you're on a Mac. If you hold down the alt button and the left mouse button, what that's going to do is rotate your view. Just make sure your cursor's in the main view port right here. If you hold down alt and click the middle mouse button, that's going to move you around. You can go up, down, left, and right like that. If you hold down and click the right mouse button, that's going to zoom in and out by moving your mouse left and right. You can also zoom in and out by scrolling the middle mouse wheel. Also, there's a box up here. You can use this to quickly move around to different views in your main viewport. Also, if you have your mouse over the main viewport and you click the space button, that's going to take you to a view like this. You can see your top, front, and side views as well. If you hold your mouse over one of these viewports, it's going to take you there and you can use all of the navigation that we just discussed except for rotate. That's going to be locked. You'll see in a little while how these different views are going to help you understand what's going on in 3D. "