views. Move your mouse cursor up to change to top view, down for bottom view, left and right for their respective views, and so on. It’s really incredibly fast. It feels almost like you’re flinging the 3D Viewport around in front of you. On the right side of Figure 2-3 is the pie version of the View menu.
Behold the power of the numeric keypad!
The View menu and navigation controls are certainly helpful, even with the pie menu, but you can change your view in an even faster way: the numeric keypad. Each button on your keyboard’s numeric keypad has an extremely fast way of changing your viewing angle in the 3D Viewport. Figure 2-4 is an image of the numeric keypad with an indication of what each key does.
FIGURE 2-3: The View menu in the 3D Viewport (left) and the pie menu version of the View menu (right).
FIGURE 2-4: The numeric keypad is your ultimate tool for navigating 3D space.
If the image in Figure 2-4 doesn’t quite work for you as a reference, Table 2-2 shows what each key does in a table-based format.
In Figure 2-4, notice that the hotkeys are arranged in a way that corresponds with how you would expect them to be. Top view is at the top of the keypad at Numpad 7. The front view is accessed at Numpad 1, and if you move to the right on the keypad, you can see the right side view by pressing Numpad 3. Because it’s the view you render from, the active camera is the most important and, therefore, gets the largest key at Numpad 0. Pressing Numpad 5 is a quick way to toggle between orthographic and perspective views.
TABLE 2-2 Hotkeys on the Numeric Keypad
| Hotkey | Result | Hotkey | Result | Hotkey | Result |
| 1 | Front | Ctrl+1 | Back | + | Zoom in |
| 2 | Orbit back | Ctrl+2 | Pan down | - | Zoom out |
| 3 | Right side | Ctrl+3 | Left side | / | Toggle local view |
| 4 | Orbit left | Ctrl+4 | Pan left | . | View selected |
| 5 | Perspective/Orthographic | ||||
| 6 | Orbit right | Ctrl+6 | Pan right | ||
| 7 | Top | Ctrl+7 | Bottom | ||
| 8 | Orbit forward | Ctrl+8 | Pan up | ||
| 0 | Camera view | Ctrl+0 | Set active object as camera | Ctrl+Alt+0 | Set user view as camera |
Here is where the numeric keypad shows its real power. With the numeric keypad, you can just as easily view the opposite angle (bottom, back, or other side views) as you can the standard views. To see the opposite side of the standard views, press Ctrl while hitting the corresponding Numpad key. For example, if you want to see the bottom view, press Ctrl+Numpad 7.
Now, maybe you got a little bit excited and hit Ctrl+Numpad 0 to see what the opposite of the camera view is and had some unexpected results. Ctrl+Numpad 0 does something entirely different than pressing Ctrl in combination with the other Numpad numbers. The Ctrl+Numpad 0 hotkey actually allows you to treat any selectable object in Blender as a camera, with the view looking down the object’s local Z-axis. You can also access this functionality from the View menu at View ⇒ Cameras ⇒ Set Active Object as Camera. If you’re confused, take a quick look at the beginning of Chapter 3 for more explanation on local and global coordinate systems. The ability to treat any object as a camera may seem like a strange feature to have, but it can be really helpful for doing things like aiming lights and checking the line of sight of an object or a character.
The
