Viewport & Camera

The viewport is your live window into the 3D scene. You fly the camera around, click objects to select them, and drag colorful handles to move, rotate, and scale your world.

If you have ever used Blender, Unreal, or Unity, this will feel familiar. If you haven't — don't worry, you only need a few keys to get going.

Moving the camera

The camera orbits around a focus point and zooms in and out toward it. Start with these and you'll be comfortable in a minute:

Input	What it does
Right-click + drag	Look around
Right-click + WASD	Fly forward / back / left / right
Right-click + E / Q	Fly up / down
Middle-click + drag	Orbit around the focus point
Shift + Right-click + drag	Pan (slide the view sideways and up/down)
Scroll wheel	Zoom in / out
Hold Ctrl while moving	Move slowly, for fine adjustments

The camera moves slowly when you're close to something and faster when you're far away, so navigating both tiny props and huge levels feels natural.

Tip: In Edit mode (mesh editing) the E and Q fly keys are used by the editing tools instead. WASD still flies — use scroll or Shift+Right-drag to move up and down.

Handy camera shortcuts

Key	What it does
F	Focus on the selected object (centers the camera on it)
A	Frame All — fit the whole scene into view
Home	Reset the camera to its starting position
End	Move the focus point to wherever your cursor is pointing
[ / ]	Slow down / speed up the camera

There's also a small button cluster on the right edge of each viewport for Pan and Zoom (press and drag) plus Grid and scene-Icons toggles, and an orientation gizmo in the top-right corner that shows which way the camera is facing.

Different views of your scene

Want to line something up dead-on from the front or top? The numpad snaps the camera to straight-on views:

Key	View
Numpad 1	Front (add Ctrl for Back)
Numpad 3	Right (add Ctrl for Left)
Numpad 7	Top (add Ctrl for Bottom)
Numpad 5	Switch between perspective and flat (orthographic)

The viewport header also has a 3D / 2D / UI selector: 2D is a placeholder for now — selecting it shows a dark "coming soon" backdrop while the 2D editor is still in development — and UI opens the canvas where you build your game's interface with the renzora_ember markup system.

Adding shapes from the toolbar

The toolbar carries a shapes dropdown (the multi-square icon, next to the transform tools). Click it for a categorized list of every built-in primitive — Basic (cube, sphere, cylinder, plane, cone, capsule…), Curved, Level building blocks, and Advanced. Picking one drops it into your scene at the origin, ready to move with the gizmo. The menu stays open so you can add several in a row, and every add is a single undo step.

It's the same shape list as the shape-library panel and the hierarchy's Add Entity menu, so whatever you register shows up in all three.

Display toggles

Key	Toggle
Alt + Z	Wireframe mode
Alt + Shift + Z	Lighting on / off
Ctrl + G	Grid on / off

These use Alt so they don't clash with Ctrl+Z (undo). Note that H hides the selected object.

Moving objects: the gizmo

When you select an object, a set of colored handles — the gizmo — appears on it. Drag a handle to transform the object. The handles always draw on top of your scene and stay a comfortable size no matter how far away the camera is.

Switch between gizmo tools with these keys:

Key	Tool	Handles you'll see
Q	Select	None — just click to pick objects
W	Move	Colored arrows and plane squares
E	Rotate	Three colored circles
R	Scale	Colored lines with little cube caps

The colors map to the 3D axes: X is red, Y is green, Z is blue. A handle turns yellow when you hover or drag it. (You can see the Move arrows on the selected scooter in the screenshot above.)

Because the handles draw on top of everything, they'd normally hide the object as you drag it. To keep the object visible, the whole gizmo fades to translucent while you're dragging a handle and snaps back to fully opaque on release. How transparent it gets is up to you — set Settings → Viewport → Gizmos → Drag Opacity (0 = invisible during the drag, 1 = no fade). The setting is saved per project.

Rotating and scaling pivot around the object's bounding-box center, so objects transform in place rather than drifting — this holds even for imported models whose pivot was authored at the world origin.

World vs Local space

The World / Local button in the toolbar (next to the shapes dropdown) sets which axes the gizmo follows:

• World — handles align to the world axes (X/Y/Z), regardless of how the object is rotated.
• Local — handles align to the object's own orientation, so dragging moves it along its axes.

Either way the transform is applied correctly even when the object is nested under a rotated or scaled parent. Scale always acts along the object's own axes (the toggle only changes which way the scale handles point).

Transform from the keyboard

If you'd rather not grab a handle, you can drive a transform straight from the keyboard with an object selected:

• Press G to grab/move, R to rotate, or S to scale.
• Press X, Y, or Z to lock to one axis.
• Type a number for an exact amount.
• Press Enter (or left-click) to confirm, Escape (or right-click) to cancel.

A small readout shows the current mode and any number you type.

Selecting objects

Input	What it does
Left-click	Select the object under the cursor
Shift + click	Add an object to the selection
Ctrl + click	Toggle an object in or out of the selection
Click + drag	Box-select everything inside the box
Click empty space	Deselect everything

Selected objects get a glowing outline and a bounding box so you always know what's picked.

The grid

The grid is the faint set of lines on the ground that helps you judge distance and keep things lined up. The center lines show the world axes (X red, Y green, Z blue), and the grid fades out in the distance — zoom out and more of it appears. Toggle it with Ctrl+G.

Working with multiple viewports

You can open up to four viewports at once to set up a classic layout — perspective, front, top, and side all visible together. Each one looks at the same scene from its own angle.

The active viewport is whichever one your cursor is over, so the gizmo and camera controls always act on the view you're working in. Switching to perspective or flat view applies to all of them at once; each viewport keeps its own angle.

Previewing a camera shot

The Camera Preview panel shows the scene from one of your game cameras, so you can frame an in-game shot while you keep editing from a different angle. It previews, in order: a selected object that has a camera, your default camera, or the first camera it finds in the scene. The preview matches your scene's sky and lighting so it looks like the final result.

Playing your game

Press Play to play-test your game without leaving the editor. Edit mode and play mode share the viewport panel: when you press Play, the viewport switches from your editor camera to the running game (seen through the active game camera), constrained to the panel — your hierarchy, inspector, console, and the rest of the editor all stay on screen. Press Stop (or Esc) and the viewport flips straight back to the editor camera, right where you left it.

• Pressing Play brings the viewport tab to the front automatically, so you see the game even if you were looking at another tab when you started.
• Entering play gives a clean game view: it clears your selection and hides the editor toolbars, the axis gizmo, and the viewport buttons; Stop brings them back.
• Maximize on Play (Settings → Viewport → Camera, on by default): pressing Play collapses the dock to just the viewport for a full-panel game view, and Stop restores your layout. Turn it off to keep the rest of your panels visible while playing.
• If no viewport panel is open at all, play falls back to taking over the whole window.
• The game's render resolution follows the active camera's resolution setting, just like the editor view.

Input goes to the game globally while playing — keyboard and mouse reach your scripts even though the game is windowed. A script that grabs the cursor (e.g. an FPS look controller) grabs it for the whole editor window.