Reply To: Different Gizmo Axis Views

[Dwayne Savage]

Since you mentioned that you’re using a laptop and a beginner let me introduce some options. I’ll try not to cause option overload, which is a common thing in Blender. I personally prefer the view pie menu. The navigation gizmo is great when using a digital drawing pad/tablet. By default the view pie is the tilde key to the left of the number 1 on the top row on a standard qwerty keyboard. Technically the symbol below it. In Blender it’s called grave accent(`). It has like 18 names thus why people refer to it as tilde(~). I change mine to the D key. I also enable Pie on drag, and I usually recommend to new people to play with extra shading pie menu items. Doing this takes 15 hotkeys and changes them to 3 hotkeys and a mouse movement. Just using the view pie menu(Tilde) alone takes 8 hotkeys and makes it 1.({Front}Numpad 1, {Back}Ctrl+numpad 1, {Right}numpad 3, {Left}Ctrl+numpad 3, {Top}Numpad 7, {Bottom}ctrl+numpad 7, {Camera}numpad 0, and {Frame Selected}numpad period). Note: The real power of the pie menu is to hold the key down and move mouse towards the option you want. When the mouse cursor hits the circle the option will become highlighted. Let go of the key and that option will be selected. So, as you gain muscle memory this will become faster.

Checking Pie menu on drag makes the following changes: Pressing tilde goes into walk/fly mode. Hold tilde down and move the mouse(Called dragging) you get view pie menu. Pressing Tab will toggle edit mode. Hold Tab down and drag you get Mode pie menu(Normal hot key is Ctrl+Tab). Press Z will toggle wireframe shading(Shift+z is normal hotkey). Hold z down and drag gives Shader Pie menu(Z by default). 

Checking Extra Shading Pie Menu Items adds Toggle overlays(Shfit+Ctrl+z) and Toggle X-Ray(Alt+z) options to the shader pie menu.

Both options are in preferences(F4->Preference, Edit->Preference, or in 4.0 or newer ctrl+comma{,}) under Keymap. At the top.

If you want to map to D key. In keymap you click key-binding button next to the search field at the top. Type “grave” without the quotes in the search box to see all the binding to that key. Then under the 3D View section you will see View and View Navigation. To the right of View you will see ` or Drag+` if you have Pie on drag checked. Click there and press D. It will disappear. I use double click D for Walk mode, because I use it a lot. Most people don’t use it that much. If you want to do that too then next to View Navigation click it and press D. Note: if you have Pie on drag checked there will be 2 entries you want the one with just ` not Shift `. Delete grave from search and type D. You will have to scroll down to 3D View. If you had Pie on drag checked you won’t need to do anything for pie menu. If not then on view expand it if it isn’t already and in the panel you will see a call pie in a field then the D and a dropdown box next to it. I don’t remember if it defaults to press or click. Click it and change it to drag. If you decided to do the View Navigation then expand and change that to Double Click. This makes pressing d do nothing. Hold d and drag gives View pie menu. double tapping D goes into walk/fly mode(Walk is set by default). Hold D and press and hold left mouse button allows you to draw annotations. Hold D and press and hold right mouse button to erase annotations. If you want to remove custom keymap you can click the x to the far right for each one or you can delete everything out of the search box, scroll down to 3D View and click the restore button to the right. This also lets you know you have custom keymaps. In older versions you have to expand the 3D View to see the restore button.