Viewport and Camera
The viewport is your live view of the scene. This page covers moving the camera, the tools along its edges, and what you can switch on and off.
Moving the camera
| Input | What it does |
|---|---|
| Right-click and drag | Look around |
Right-click and W A S D | Fly forward, back, left, right |
Right-click and E / Q | Fly up and down |
| Middle-click and drag | Orbit the focus point |
Shift and right-click drag | Pan |
| Scroll wheel | Zoom |
Hold Ctrl while moving | Move slowly, for fine adjustments |
The camera moves slowly when you are close to something and faster when you are far away, so small props and large levels both feel natural. E and Q ease off near ground level so you can settle onto the floor rather than punch through it.
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
F | Frame the selection |
A | Frame the whole scene |
Home | Reset the camera |
End | Move the focus point to wherever your cursor is pointing |
[ / ] | Slow down, speed up |
An orientation gizmo in the top-right corner shows which way the camera is facing. Click one of its balls to snap to that axis, or drag it to orbit.
Below it sits a cluster of four camera controls: Reset View, Pan, Zoom and Grid. Press and drag Pan or Zoom. Grid lights up while the floor grid is on.
Straight-on views
| Key | View |
|---|---|
Numpad 1 | Front, with Ctrl for Back |
Numpad 3 | Right, with Ctrl for Left |
Numpad 7 | Top, with Ctrl for Bottom |
Numpad 5 | Switch between perspective and orthographic |
The same views are in the camera menu on the toolbar.
The toolbar
Along the top edge of the viewport, left to right: Undo, Redo and Save, then the tool buttons, the snap steps, the shape, display, gizmo and camera menus, Play, and this viewport's own view-angle and World / Local controls. Maximize floats against the right edge.
The tool buttons are Select, Move, Rotate and Scale, plus the terrain modes when a terrain is selected and anything plugins add.
The snap steps sit inline: click the icon to toggle that snap, then drag or type the number to set its step. Fractions are fine, so a quarter-unit grid is 0.25. The magnet in the Snap menu lights up while any snap is on.
The tool shelf
Down the left edge of the viewport is the tool shelf, a two-column palette of brushes and operations. It shows what the toolbar's modes open, and each group appears only when it applies.
| Group | Shows when | Holds |
|---|---|---|
| Terrain, whole | Any terrain tool is in hand | Generate Terrain, Resize Terrain, Terrain Size and Resolution |
| Terrain, sculpt | Sculpt Terrain is active | All 17 sculpt brushes |
| Terrain, paint | Paint Terrain Layers is active | Paint, Erase, Smooth, Fill |
| Foliage | Paint Foliage is active | Paint and Erase, then one button per foliage type |
Plugins can add their own groups. In the 2D view the shelf collapses entirely.
While a terrain brush is in hand, a brush settings bar appears under the toolbar with that brush's size, strength and falloff, plus whatever the brush adds of its own.
The gizmo
Select an object and a set of coloured handles appears. Drag one to transform the object. The handles draw on top of the scene and stay a comfortable size however far away the camera is.
Q W E R switch between Select, Move, Rotate and Scale.
World or Local decides which axes the gizmo uses. World keeps the handles aligned to the scene. Local aligns them to the object's own rotation, which is what you want when nudging something along its own forward.
From the keyboard
Press a key, move the mouse, click to confirm.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
G | Grab and move |
R | Rotate |
S | Scale |
X / Y / Z | Lock to one axis, press again to clear |
Shift and an axis key | Lock to the plane facing that axis |
| Numbers | Type an exact amount |
Enter or left-click | Confirm |
Esc or right-click | Cancel |
The shading switch
Four buttons sit centred on the viewport's top edge. They are a ladder, each adding one thing to the one below.
| Mode | Adds | What you see |
|---|---|---|
| Wireframe | Topology | Edges only, on a flat dark background |
| Solid | Form | Neutral clay under matcap shading, no materials or scene lighting in the way |
| Material | Materials and lighting | Real materials and textures, lit, with shadows, against a flat background |
| Rendered | The world | Sky, atmosphere and clouds around them. The final look. |
These are presets over the same switches the Display menu holds, so change one by hand and no button is lit. Click one to get back.
Only Rendered shows the world environment. That is the point of having both it and Material: Material is where you judge materials and lighting without a sky colouring everything you are trying to read. Nothing in the scene is edited either way.
Display
The Display menu holds mesh, textures, lighting, shadows, the grid and the overlays.
Turning Textures off does not unlight the scene. Surfaces keep their real lighting and shadows and swap their maps for the blockout grid, so the scene reads as untextured geometry rather than geometry in the dark.
| Key | Toggle |
|---|---|
Alt+Z | Wireframe |
Alt+Shift+Z | Lighting |
Ctrl+G | Grid |
Realtime
By default the viewport renders only when something in the scene changes. It keeps rendering for a moment afterwards so anti-aliasing and ray tracing can settle, then holds its last image until the next change.
This matters most in a heavy scene. The editor UI and the viewport share one renderer, so a scene that renders at 6 FPS used to hold every panel, hover and keystroke to 6 FPS too. With the viewport idle, the rest of the editor runs at full speed. Moving something, or the camera, still runs at the scene's own frame rate.
What wakes it:
- Moving, adding, removing or editing anything in the scene, including the World Environment
- Moving the camera
- Moving the mouse or pressing a key over the viewport
- Meshes, materials and textures changing or finishing loading
- Changing the selection or a viewport setting
- Resizing or docking a viewport
Some things move without the scene changing, and they hold still while the viewport is idle: wind sway, water, animated clouds, and GPU particles. Switch on Render > Realtime in the Display menu to render every frame, as the viewport did before. The same switch is Settings > Viewport > Performance > Realtime Viewport, and it is saved with the project.
Visualization modes
The Visualization row replaces every material in the viewport with one that answers a single question: Normals, Roughness, Metallic, Depth, UV Checker or Matcap. None puts the real materials back.
These are a view, not an edit. Nothing is written to your materials and nothing ships.
Matcap is the one to reach for when you are judging a form. Its lights are fixed to the camera rather than the world, so orbiting tells you about the shape rather than about the lighting. It also shades creases by curvature rather than by direction, so fine detail that is invisible under lit shading shows up.
The floor grid
The Grid row has an on/off switch and a - / + pair. Each press of + divides the grid into smaller squares, in powers of two, so finer lines always fall on the coarser ones. The number between them is the divisor. New projects start at 2.
Statistics
Switch on Overlays > Statistics for a small block of numbers in the bottom-left corner.
| Row | Counts |
|---|---|
| Objects | Mesh instances the renderer is drawing. An imported model is usually several. |
| Verts | Total vertices |
| Tris | Total triangles. The number to watch when a scene feels heavy. |
| Height | Terrain only. The lowest and highest point of the actual ground, in metres. |
| Range | Terrain only. The envelope those heights are stored inside. |
The counts refresh four times a second. Clicks pass straight through to the scene behind.
Gizmos
The Gizmos menu controls what the editor draws on top of your scene, as opposed to Display, which controls what the renderer produces.
| Group | Switch | Hides |
|---|---|---|
| Selection | Bounding Box | The orange wireframe box around the selection |
| Scene | Lights | Light falloff wireframes: point spheres, spot cones, the sun's arrow, probe boxes |
| Scene | Cameras | The selected camera's frustum and forward arrow |
| Scene | Scene Icons | Light bulb, sun and camera glyphs |
| Scene | Labels | Entity names floating above each object. Off by default. |
| Rigging | Skeleton | The bone meshes over a selected rigged model |
| Physics | Colliders | Collision wireframes, with a Selected Only or Always choice below |
Everything is on by default except Labels, and each switch is saved with the project.
Collider wireframes are cross-hatched so each face reads as a surface rather than a jumble of lines. Colour carries the body type: green static, orange dynamic, blue sensor.
Skeleton is the one to turn off on heavy rigs. Bone gizmos are real meshes rebuilt every frame, so a densely boned character costs more than the line-based gizmos.
The same switches are in Settings > Viewport > Gizmos.
Selecting
Click an object to select it. Ctrl+Click adds or removes, Shift+Click extends a range, and dragging from empty space rubber-bands a selection. Esc clears it.
H hides the selection and Shift+H isolates it, hiding everything else.
Adding shapes
The shapes dropdown at the left end of the toolbar lists every built-in primitive, grouped into Basic, Curved, Level and Advanced. Picking one drops it at the origin. The menu stays open so you can add several, and each add is one undo step.
It is the same list as the Shape Library panel and the Hierarchy's Add Entity menu.
New shapes arrive with a generated grid material on them, so you can see their form and scale before you have made any materials. Replace it by dropping a material on the object.
Dropping models in
Drag a model from the Assets panel into the viewport and it spawns where you dropped it, sitting on whatever surface is under the cursor.
You don't have to wait for a large model to load before letting go. While it loads, a translucent box follows the cursor; drop it and the box stays on that spot, a Loading card in the middle of the viewport names the model, and the model replaces the box the moment it is ready. You can keep working, or drop more models, in the meantime. If a model fails to load, the box and the card go away and the Console says why.
Multiple viewports
You can open up to four viewports at once, each with its own camera and its own view angle. Add them from the Add Panel picker.
Gizmo settings are global, so switching one switches all of them. Each viewport keeps its own camera, shading mode and view angle.
Camera Preview is a separate panel that shows what a selected camera sees, so you can frame a shot without flying there.
If the viewport feels slow
Most of the cost of a frame is fullscreen image effects, and that cost grows with your display's resolution. On older laptops, integrated graphics or high-DPI screens the editor can feel sluggish even on an empty scene.
If the whole editor drags, check Display > Render > Realtime is off, so the viewport only renders when something changes (see Realtime).
Open Settings > Viewport > Performance > Graphics Quality and drop it a notch.
| Tier | What it does |
|---|---|
| High | Everything on |
| Medium | Turns off SSAO and drops the sky to its cheaper lookup path. Bloom, anti-aliasing, auto-exposure and clouds are kept |
| Low | Turns those off too: bloom, TAA, auto-exposure and clouds all go |
Shadow maps and the sky's reflection probe also shrink a step at each tier, which is the rest of where the frame time goes.
Medium is the default. The choice is per user, not per project: it is saved to ~/.renzora/settings.toml and applies to every project you open on this machine.
It is a different setting from the one under Settings > Project > Rendering, which is the tier the exported game runs at. A project set to High there still draws its editor viewport at whatever this one says.
When a tier has switched an effect off
A gated effect keeps its component, its enable toggle and its settings, and simply stops appearing. To make that legible rather than mysterious, the Inspector puts an amber warning triangle in the header of any component the current tier has switched off or reduced. Hover it and the tooltip names the tier, says what it did, and points at the setting.
The components that can carry it are Clouds, Bloom, TAA, Auto Exposure, SSAO and Atmosphere. So if clouds are not drawing and the Clouds header has the triangle, nothing is broken: raise the tier.