Viewport and navigation

The viewport is the 3D view of your show. After this page you can move the camera with a mouse or trackpad, use the tools and gizmos, snap to exact views with the ViewCube, and select elements.

Panning, orbiting and zooming in the viewport

Move the camera

Action	Mouse	Trackpad
Pan across the ground	Left-drag	Press and drag
Orbit around the point under the cursor	Right-drag, or Shift + left-drag	Shift + press and drag
Zoom toward the cursor	Scroll wheel	Two-finger scroll, or pinch

Orbit means circling the camera around a point while looking at it.

These gestures also work when you press on the sky or look almost level across the ground, which is where the show sits in a front view. There, a left-drag slides the camera in the direction you drag, and a right-drag or Shift-drag orbits around the point under the cursor.

Each show remembers its own camera position in your browser, so it opens where you left it.

Tool rail

The four buttons in the top-left corner pick the active tool. The tool rail is hidden during bake playback.

Tool	Key	What it does
Hand	H	Camera only, no gizmo. This is the default.
Move	G	Move the selection.
Rotate	R	Rotate the selection.
Scale	S	Resize the selection.

Gizmos

A gizmo is the set of coloured handles that appears on a selected element when Move, Rotate or Scale is active. Red is the X axis, green is Y and blue is Z.

Dragging an element with the Move gizmo

Tool	Handles
Move	Drag an arrow to move along that axis, or a small square to move on a flat plane.
Rotate	Drag a ring to turn around that axis.
Scale	Drag a handle to stretch along that axis.

Press Esc during a drag to cancel it. The top bar's Local and Global buttons set which way the axes point. Center and Pivot set the point that rotation and scaling turn around.

A few things to know:

• With several elements selected in Center mode, the gizmo sits at the centre of the group and they move as one.
• In Pivot mode an amber dot marks the pivot point. Drag the dot to move it. You can also set it in the Transform section.
• A Launch Pad stays flat on the ground: it moves in X and Y, rotates around Z, and scaling it resizes its width and length.
• If a property has keyframes, a drag writes a keyframe at the playhead instead of changing the base value. See Transforms and keyframes.

Keyboard drags

With the pointer over the viewport, G, R and S do more than pick the tool. If something is selected, the drag starts at once and the selection follows your mouse with no button held.

1. Select an element.
2. Hold the pointer over the viewport and press G.
3. Optional: press X, Y or Z to lock the drag to that axis. Press the same key again to release it.
4. Optional: press Shift with the axis key to keep the drag on the flat plane across that axis instead.
5. Click or press Enter to confirm. Press Esc or right-click to cancel.

A status line at the bottom of the viewport reminds you which keys are active. Pressing G, R or S during a drag cancels it and starts that kind of drag instead.

ViewCube

The cube in the top-right corner shows which way you are looking. Click a part of it to swing the camera to that view.

Clicking the ViewCube and its ring

Click	Result
A face	A straight view: FRONT, BACK, LEFT, RIGHT, TOP or BOTTOM. FRONT looks from the audience side.
An edge or corner	An angled view between those faces.

The part under your cursor turns orange before you click. The views follow the show's heading, so FRONT is always the show's face, even if the show is rotated on the map.

The ring around the cube has eight buttons:

Ring position	Button	What it does
Top	Orbit up	Turns the view 90 degrees up.
Bottom	Orbit down	Turns the view 90 degrees down.
Left	Orbit left	Turns the view 90 degrees left.
Right	Orbit right	Turns the view 90 degrees right.
Top left	Roll left	Tilts the picture 90 degrees.
Top right	Roll right	Tilts the picture 90 degrees the other way.
Bottom left	Home view	Returns to the home view.
Bottom right	Isometric view	Jumps to an angled view from the front, right and top.

Home view normally puts you 300 m in front of the show, 10 m above the ground, like a person in the crowd. To use your own view, go to Environment, open the Camera section and press Save current view as reset.

Select elements

Click an element's slots to select it. This also works in Wireframe and Drones views, where the slots are not drawn. The status bar names the selection, and the Properties panel and Timeline update to match.

Action	Result
Click a slot	Selects that element only.
Cmd (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows) + click	Adds the element to the selection, or removes it.
Click empty space	Clears the selection.

A press that moves more than a few pixels counts as a camera move, not a click. Selection by clicking is off during bake playback. To select something hard to reach, use the Hierarchy panel instead.

Box select

Box selection in the viewport is for picking individual slots. It works only while you pick slots for a clip, for example after you press Pick slots on a colour clip, or while you choose drones to split from a Path. The view switches to Slots while you pick, and goes back afterwards.

Action	Result
Click a slot	Adds or removes that one slot.
Shift + drag	Draws a box and adds the slots inside it.
Shift + Alt + drag	Draws a box and removes the slots inside it.

At any other time Shift + drag orbits the camera. To select several clips, use the timeline box. See Colours Manipulator.

Edit buttons

When you select some element types, a button appears at the top of the viewport to edit them point by point: Edit spline, Edit points or Edit SVG. See Splines, Point clouds and Images and SVG.

Tips

• If a tool key seems to do nothing, check that the pointer is over the viewport and that no text field is active.
• Stay on Hand while you look around, so that a stray press cannot move an element.
• Press Home view if you get lost.

Next

Organise your elements in the Hierarchy panel.