Move the camera

Orbit, pan, zoom, frame – operate a 3D scene like a cinematographer.

After this you'll be moving the camera around the scene like you've worked in 3D before. The viewport is where you'll spend most of your time, and the controls are not what your hands are going to guess if you came from Blender, Maya, or Unreal. Sort it out now and the rest of Build mode falls into place.

Empty Compose-mode shot with the orbit / pan / zoom gesture overlay visible as dotted arcs during the drag motion

What's getting in the way

The mental model trips people first. Your 3D viewport is not a camera – it's the space you move yourself around in to build. The shot cameras you place later in Compose mode are the ones that get rendered; you snap in and out of those. Moving around in Build mode is just repositioning your own view of the scene, not setting up a shot.

The controls lean on cinematographer verbs rather than a DCC's mouse conventions: you orbit, pan, dolly, strafe, and boom. Once that clicks, the rest of Build mode falls into place.

Direct quote from the user-testing notes that captures the early friction: "Moving the camera felt like a chore." It stops feeling that way once the bindings below are in your hands.

How to do it

For the scene camera in Build mode:

1. Orbit. Left-click and drag.
2. Pan. Hold Shift and left-click-drag.
3. Dolly in and out. Scroll the wheel, or use W / S (the up / down arrows do the same).
4. Strafe and boom. A / D strafe the camera left and right; Q / E boom it up and down.
5. Frame an object. Click the object, then press F. The camera moves to fill the frame with it. Use this any time you've drifted off and lost the scene.

For larger sets – a city populator, a tropical-forest populator, anywhere you're navigating across hundreds of meters – speed the camera up with the , and . keys. The default speed is tuned for a single set the size of a living room and feels slow on bigger environments.

The full binding list lives in Keyboard shortcuts, or open the in-app shortcuts panel from the help icon in the top-right.

Common mistakes

• Reaching for another DCC's bindings. If orbit isn't responding, you're probably right-click-dragging out of Blender habit – orbit is a plain left-click-drag here. Pan is Shift + left-click-drag.
• Fighting a slow camera on a big set. The camera feels syrupy across a large environment until you bump the speed with , and ..

Related

• The three modes
• Compose mode camera controls
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Working with objects – the next step once you can move the camera.
• Selection and grouping – multi-select once you have things to select.
• Build mode – the section landing page for the rest of the art-department workflow.