Navigating

How to move the camera around your model and switch what the viewport shows.

Camera controls

Use these in the 3D viewport:

Action	Control
Orbit	Alt + left-drag
Pan	Middle-mouse drag
Zoom	Right-drag (or the mouse wheel)

Hold Shift while orbiting to snap the view to 45° increments (front / side / back / diagonals + top / bottom); the snapped pose is kept when you release.

These are the camera gestures only. Brush gestures (size, hardness, smooth intensity, eyedropper) and the rest of the input gestures live in the Reference › Keyboard shortcuts & gestures — that page is the single source of truth.

View modes

A strip of tabs along the top of the viewport switches what it shows — handy for inspecting individual outputs while you paint. Click a tab, or use its shortcut key:

Shaded (`) — the lit material, all channels combined. The default.
Flat — the unlit Base Color, no lighting.
Per channel — one tab per channel in the active set (Base Color, Roughness, Normal, …); each has its own key, so you see exactly what you're painting into.
Mask (M) — the active layer's mask in isolation.
Final Normal — the combined normal that gets exported (baked + painted Normal + Height).

Once you've baked, a second row of tabs appears with each baked mesh map — Position, World Normal, Curvature, AO, Thickness, Normal, and Material ID — to view it on the model (see Baking).

View-mode and channel tabs in the viewport

Lighting & display

The Light / Environment panel controls how the model is lit and displayed in the viewport. These are display settings — they affect what you see, not the textures you export, and they aren't part of undo.

Exposure

Exposure brightens or darkens the whole view, measured in EV stops (−8 to +8, default 0). It's applied before tonemapping, so it behaves like a camera's exposure dial rather than a simple brightness slider.

Directional lights

There are three directional lights — Key, Fill, and Rim. Each has its own checkbox to enable/disable it, plus:

Control	What it does
Azimuth	Dial — the light's compass direction around the model.
Elevation	Slider, −90° to +90° — how high or low the light sits.
Intensity	Slider, 0 to 10 — the light's strength.
Color	Swatch — opens a colour picker for the light's tint.

You can aim the Key light straight from the viewport: Shift + right-drag rotates it (drag horizontally for azimuth, vertically for elevation). Hold Ctrl during the drag for fine control. The panel dials re-sync when you release. See Reference › shortcuts.

Ambient

A hemispheric ambient term fills the unlit areas with a soft gradient. Set a Top colour (the sky) and a Bottom colour (the ground) with the two swatches; the surface blends between them by how much it faces up or down. Strength (0 to 2) scales the whole ambient contribution.

Background & tonemapping

The Background swatch sets the viewport's clear colour. The view is tonemapped with a fixed ACES curve (after exposure) to keep highlights from clipping harshly — this isn't an adjustable control, just how the lit result is displayed.

Reset to Defaults restores the entire lighting rig to its original look.