Moving around a view

Every view that shows something in three dimensions moves the same way:

• a model: glb gltf fbx blend obj, or a Unity asset
• a CAD part: step sldprt catpart
• a shader drawn on a shape
• the usage disc, where a click picks a pole or one of the objects on it

Drag to look around, hold Shift to pan, use the wheel to zoom, and double-click to start over.

With the mouse

Input	What it does
Drag	rotate around the object
Shift-drag, right-drag, middle-drag	pan: slide the object across the view
Wheel, or scroll or pinch on a trackpad	zoom in or out on the point under the pointer
Double-click	reset: back to the angle, size and place it opened at
Click without moving	pick what is under the pointer; a model marks the face

Panning moves the camera, never the object. ObjectExplorer only reads the file and never changes it.

With the keyboard

The keys work once the view has focus: click it, or press Tab until the content pane has focus. While the tree has focus, the arrow keys move through the tree instead.

Key	What it does
← → ↑ ↓	rotate, the same as dragging that way
⇧ + arrow	pan
1	look straight at the front
3	look straight at the right side
7	look straight down at the top
9	look from the opposite side: back, left or bottom
0	isometric: the front, the right side and the top at equal slants
F	fit: keep the angle, bring the whole object back to view
R	reset, the same as a double-click

9 turns to the side opposite the one you are looking at: after 1 it shows the back, after 3 the left side, after 7 the bottom. The number keys follow Blender's numpad, and the row above the letters works as well as the numpad. A number key changes only the angle, so the zoom and the pan stay where they are.

Which way is up

The view turns a part like a turntable, around the vertical. File formats disagree about which axis is vertical, so each file is stood up the way the program that wrote it meant:

File	Up
glb gltf obj, Unity	Y
fbx	whatever the file says, usually Y
blend catpart	Z
sldprt	Y
step	the program that wrote it, see below

A STEP file has no up of its own. It keeps the axes of the program that exported it, and names that program in its header if the exporter filled that in. The part stands on Z when the header names CATIA, NX, Solid Edge, FreeCAD, Open CASCADE, Rhino, AutoCAD, SketchUp, Onshape or KiCad. Otherwise it stands on Y, as in SolidWorks, Creo and Inventor.

Front, right and top follow the same rule. For a Z-up part, the front is the side you see when you look along +Y.

Shaders

A shader drawn on a sphere, cube, plane or torus moves like a model. Double-clicking it also restarts its clock.

A shader that covers the whole canvas, like a Shadertoy mainImage, has no camera to move. Dragging with the left button moves the pointer the shader reads as iMouse, and double-clicking restarts the clock.

Flat views

A drawing (dwg), a texture (dds ktx2 hdr exr) and the texture pane beside a model are flat, so looking around and panning are the same thing:

Input	What it does
Drag	pan
Wheel	zoom in or out on the point under the pointer
Double-click	fit the whole picture in the view

A PDF

A pdf opens in ObjectExplorer's own reader, not the browser's, so it reads the same on every platform. It scrolls; the toolbar above it holds everything else.

Input	What it does
Drag over the page	select text, which can then be copied like any other text
Ctrl/⌘ + F	find: every hit is marked, Enter steps to the next, ⇧Enter back
↓ ↑ and Space	move down or up the page, a screen at a time with Space, ⇧Space back
PageDown PageUp	the next page, the previous one; → and ← do the same
Home End	the first page, the last one
Ctrl/⌘ + + − 0	zoom in, zoom out, back to the width of the pane
A mark, then select text	underline, box, circle, highlight, strike through, crossed off or bracket
The text mark, then click	type a note on the page, in the type and colour the row is set to
Click a link	follow it: one inside the document jumps, one that leaves it opens
☰	the panel beside the page: contents, thumbnails, and what the file says
⟳	turn the page a quarter turn
− + and fit	zoom, or fit the page to the width of the pane

The marks are yours, not the file's: nothing is written into the pdf, and they are remembered for that file on this machine. Four controls in the row say what the next one will be - which mark, how thick, in what colour, and in what type - each showing what is picked now, with the rest under its chevron. The eraser at the end takes a mark off again, and the pointer at the start is the way back to plain reading.

The page follows the light or dark theme the window is in - the switch in the toolbar above it - and it is not a filter over a white page: the text flips and the photographs do not.

The text over the page is the file's own text, placed where its glyphs were painted, so a selection follows the lines even where the page was drawn out of order. A scanned page whose text was read by OCR selects too: that text is in the file, drawn invisibly behind the picture.

Why Shift

On a Mac, Ctrl-click is a right click. On many Linux desktops, Alt-drag moves the whole window. Shift means nothing to the operating system, so a Shift-drag always reaches the view.

Next: where your data lives.