I’d much prefer using the walk mode rather than the orbit camera.
I’m used to first person games and find moving around in what’s effectively “noclip” far more intuitive, easier to control and precise.
The orbit camera, in comparison, is annoying and often ends up spinning around the wrong point, and can be hard to coerce into certain nooks and crannies.
Is there any way to swap defaults and make “walk mode” the primary navigation in Blender? Because it’s tiring to just keep hitting “Shift + `” all the time to engage the mode, as it always goes back to orbit every time.
I guess an issue is that the “WASD” keys actually do things in the interface. But does the ` key do anything when not shifted? Just have that single key press to go into “walk mode” and then it’s just like a toggle “move around / edit stuff” (kind of like how TAB is a toggle between object and edit mode).
The walk/fly mode is a separate mode of navigation, and thus operates on top of the base level navigation. To swap the orbiting code for the walk/fly code is a deep code swap, lots of other operators and modes depend upon the user being in orbit mode.
So no easy way, unfortunately. Though you could remap your controls. You can set middlemouse press to engage walk/fly mode, and middlemouse release to confirm. This works pretty well, actually. I just tested it, and it works pretty fluidly.
Although, for anyone else who wants to try this out, there’s one small setting missing from the above instructions. You do need to, of course, turn off what the middle mouse currently does - “rotate view” under the “3D View (Global)” - or it’ll try to do both things simultaneously, which just won’t work (was confused for a while, trying to get this to work, but then worked out that it was a conflict from the middle mouse being assigned to more than one function at the same time).
Well, it might need some tweaks as holding down the middle mouse for a good long wander around the scene can get tiring and there’s another awkwardness in that you can use the mouse wheel to speed up and slow down in walk mode - and it’s a bit of manual dexterity to scroll the wheel whilst still keeping it held down.
This is good, though. Very good. But it’d be perfect for me if it could be done like a toggle. Middle mouse click to go into walk mode and another middle mouse click to get out of it (and you’d be able to tell which “mode” you’re in by just moving the mouse to look around and, if you can’t, then you’re in “edit” mode, where the mouse cursor just acts as a mouse cursor in the normal way).
Change it so that “View Navigation” is “middle” and “click” - that engages walk mode with a press - and then you change the “confirm” under “View3D Walk Modal” to “middle” and “release” (I did try “click” but that doesn’t work for whatever reason - but a click is a press and release anyway, so if you do “release” then a click will trigger a “release” when you let go on a click anyway).
Plus, again, you have to disable its previous function in that you can “teleport” with a middle click in walk mode, so find “teleport” under “View3D Walk Modal” and turn that one off (you can still do this by pressing space as that’s an alt for it).
Then it acts like a toggle. Click middle to go into walk mode, look and move around and then middle click again to return to “edit mode”, as it were.
Actually, I’d never played with the keymap stuff before and it’s quite easily configured, isn’t it? Once you get the hang of how it works.
Thanks a bunch as this has basically nailed exactly what I was looking for. This method of looking and moving around just feels far more intuitive to me - I don’t feel like I’m fighting Blender as much as I did with the orbiting default.
Is there a way to quickly rebind all the context menus to shift+right click?(Since there’s like 50 of the damn things)
I want to basically make it, so that hold right click = walk mode, confirmed on right click release, cancelled only by Esc.
and then rebind all the context menus to shift+right click instead.(or ctrl, if blender for some reason thinks holding shift after you start holding right click, still counts as shift+right click)
The default controls for blender just make waay too frustrated to use the program, since 15+ years of video game controls experience.
I don’t think we have any quick way to change that all at once. You’ll have to manually change those one by one.
Personally, I think it’s better to just adjust to orbiting around an object instead of setting the keymap up like this anyway. Right now, you are only concerned with learning blender, but later on you might want to try another 3d app that makes you orbit around your objects and it might not support a concept like walk mode. It will be easier to adjust to other apps when you have a feel for how orbiting works.
Here are a few shortcuts that help you navigate in blender:
Pressing alt + MMB re-centers the view around the cursor’s current position on the screen.
Pressing period on the numberpad zooms into the object you have selected, and can be remapped to a fourth mouse button by right-clicking its entry on the view menu (View menu > frame selected).
Under the view tab in the panel on the right side of the viewport (press N to open it), there is a “lock to 3d cursor” option that forces orbiting and zooming to center around the 3d cursor’s current position. I don’t use this option often, but it can make navigation easier in some cases.
Pressing / on the number pad toggles local view (View menu > local view). That is a mode that displays only the objects you have selected.
The blender foundation also has a simple introductory tutorial series that explains a lot of the simple things concerning navigation and the interface:
