Of the two, I tend to use Numpad Slash the most. Pressing Numpad Slash (/) toggles what Blender calls Local View. Basically, Local View hides everything in your scene except for the object or objects you’ve selected. Local View is really helpful for temporarily isolating a single object or set of objects in a complex scene so that you can work on it without anything else getting in your way.
The Numpad Dot (.) hotkey also comes in handy when you want to focus on a specific part of your scene. Pressing Numpad Dot (.) centers the objects you’ve selected in the 3D Viewport. Centering is particularly useful if you’ve rotated or panned everything out of sight, and you want to bring your selected objects back into view.
One other key worth mentioning, although it’s not exactly on the numeric keypad, is the Home key. Whereas using Numpad Dot (.) brings your selected objects into view, pressing Home zooms your view back until all objects in your scene are visible in the 3D Viewport. Home is a very convenient key for getting an overall idea of what’s going on in your scene.
Ways to see your 3D scene
Aside from changing the angle from which you view your 3D world, you may also want to change how the world is shown in the 3D Viewport. In particular, I’m referring to what is called the viewport shading. By default, Blender starts in the Solid shading type, which shows your models as solid 3D objects, lit by the studio lights you can set in Blender’s Preferences under Lights. You can change the viewport shading from the 3D Viewport’s header by clicking any of the Viewport Shading buttons, as shown in Figure 2-5.
There are four possible viewport shading types:
Wireframe: This viewport shading type shows the objects in your scene as transparent line-drawings. The wireframe viewport shading type is a good quick way to get an idea of the structure of your models. And because Wireframe is a bunch of lines, Blender doesn’t have to worry about shading and, therefore, doesn’t tax your computer’s processor as much. On older computers, Blender is a lot more responsive using Wireframe than any of the other viewport shading types.
Solid: Solid is the default viewport shading type that Blender starts with. Solid is usually the standard mode for working in Blender. It’s the shading type that allows you to focus on just the geometry of your model without being distracted by materials or scene lighting.
Look Dev: Short for “look development,” Look Dev is a process in computer graphics where you focus on creating the materials and shaders on your objects, their “look.” Sometimes this process is also called surfacing your objects. Blender’s Look Dev viewport shading type attempts to faithfully show you what your object looks like when textured and lit. Do note that the default behavior is not to use the lighting from your scene, but instead you have the option to light your scene using an assortment of different lighting scenarios, defined by high dynamic range images, or HDRIs.
Rendered: As you might expect, this viewport shading type renders your scene in the 3D Viewport from whatever arbitrary perspective you want. Depending on the complexity of your scene, this is a great way to get a very accurate preview of your final rendered images.Fair warning: the Rendered viewport shading type can be extremely slow when using the Cycles renderer. It’s much more responsive when using Eevee. See Chapter 16 for more on the differences between Cycles and Eevee.
FIGURE 2-5: Viewport shading types from the 3D Viewport’s header (left) and from a pie menu (right).
You may also notice that if you have more than one 3D Viewport window, they don’t all have to have the same viewport shading type. You can see the wireframe of your model in one editor while adjusting the lighting using the Shaded draw type in another.
Selecting objects
How you select objects used to be one of the most controversial design decisions in Blender’s interface: In nearly every other program, you select things — be they text, 3D objects, files, or whatever — by left-clicking them. In the past, this was not the case in Blender. We used to select with right-click. See the “Why Right-click Select?” sidebar for more on why this used to be the case.
In the modern default behavior for Blender, however, selection is how you would expect. Left-click on any object in your scene and it becomes selected. Shift+left-click another object and it’s added to your selection set. Shift+left-click it again, and it’s removed from the selection. Nice and easy.
Taking advantage of the 3D cursor
That crosshair is the 3D cursor. It’s a unique concept that I’ve seen only in Blender, and this design is anything but useless. The best way to understand the 3D cursor is to think about a word processor or text editor. When you add text or want to change something in one of those programs, it’s usually done with or relative to the blinking cursor on the screen. Blender’s 3D cursor serves pretty much the same purpose, but in three dimensions. When you add a new object, it’s placed wherever the 3D cursor is located. When you rotate or scale an object, you can do it relative to the 3D cursor’s location. And when you want to snap an object to a specific location, you do it with the 3D cursor.
WHY RIGHT-CLICK SELECT?
So why in the world did older versions of Blender have right-click to select as the default behavior? Left-clicking was bound to placing Blender’s 3D cursor. I talk more about the 3D cursor later in this chapter, but in the meantime, you’re probably thinking, “But why?”
Although right-clicking to select certainly seems strange, there is actually a good reason for choosing to do it this way. This design decision wasn’t made at random or just to be different for the sake of being different. There are actually three reasons for doing it this way. One is philosophical, and the other two are practical.
Separating selection from action: In the right-click selection paradigm, the left mouse button is intended to be used to perform or confirm an action. You left-click buttons or menus and left-click to confirm the completion of an operation like moving, rotating, or scaling an object, and you use it to place the 3D cursor. Selecting an object doesn’t really act upon it or change it. So right-click is used to select objects as well as cancel an operation before it’s completed. This setup is a bit abstract, but as you work this way, it does actually begin to make sense.
Prevention of accidental mis-clicks: A functional example would be interacting with the 3D manipulator and other tools (as covered in Chapter 3). If action and selection are on the same mouse button, it’s quite easy to accidentally move an object using the 3D manipulator when you only meant to select, and vice versa. Likewise on any of Blender’s time-based editors, it was difficult to scrub without accidentally selecting a keyframe. As of Blender 2.80, there’s an explicit (and