Scene View

Last updated 17 August 2026

3D representation of your scene with displays, projectors and surfaces.

Navigating

The same gestures work on every pannable surface in Backstage, with orbit and look added here for 3D.

Action	Gesture
Orbit	`Alt` + middle-drag
Look	`Shift`+`Alt` + middle-drag
Pan	Middle-drag, or a two-finger drag
Zoom	`Ctrl` + wheel, towards the pointer. Pinch zooms along the view direction instead.
Pan vertically	Wheel
Pan horizontally	`Shift` + wheel
Select an object	Left-click it
Reset camera	`R` — back to the scene's default view
Frame selection	`F` — fills the view with the selected object. With nothing selected it resets the camera, the same as `R`.
Previous view	`Alt` + `F` — steps back through the views `F` was pressed from, newest first, up to ten.

The wheel pans; zoom is Ctrl + wheel. This is deliberate and shared across every navigable view, so the same gestures work in the scene view, the node editor and the 2D editors alike.

The axis gizmo at the top right shows which way the scene is oriented: three labelled balls for X, Y and Z, each with a smaller unlabelled ball opposite it for the negative direction. Click one to look along that axis. Hovering the gizmo lists every navigation binding on this page at once, so the gestures can be checked without leaving the view.

Creating objects

Right-click empty space for the Add scene object menu — the same one the + button in Scene Objects opens. Right-clicking an object instead opens its own actions.

Dragging an asset onto empty space asks Create a display or surface? and builds the object around that asset.

Transforming a selected object

The toolbar at the top left switches between Move Object, Rotate Object and Scale Object. Beside it, a selector chooses the world or local coordinate system, and snap options constrain movement to fixed increments per axis.

With the mouse — drag the arrows or circles of the gizmo to act on one axis. In move and scale mode, the white point at the centre acts on all three at once.
With the keyboard — arrow keys and Page Up / Page Down for the third axis. Ctrl gives fine steps, Shift coarse ones.

The transform mode is set from the toolbar buttons. There is no keyboard shortcut for switching between move, rotate and scale.

Mesh editing

With Edit Mesh selected in a surface's Surface Default Properties, the surface's vertices appear here and can be moved individually.

Action	How
Select a vertex	Left-click the white point
Select several	Hold `Ctrl` while clicking, to move them together
Move along one axis	Drag a coloured arrow
Move freely	Drag the white centre point
Move by keyboard	Arrow keys and `Page Up` / `Page Down`; `Ctrl` fine, `Shift` coarse

Only the move operation is available while editing a mesh — the mode switches to it automatically and rotate and scale are disabled.

Common Mistakes

The wheel zooms out instead of moving the view, or the reverse — the wheel pans and Ctrl+wheel zooms. This changed when navigation was unified across all views.
Dragging in empty space does not orbit — orbit is Alt+middle-drag. A plain drag in empty space is not a navigation gesture.
An object moves along the wrong axis — the gizmo follows the world or local coordinate system depending on the selector next to the transform buttons.
Rotate and scale are unavailable — mesh editing is active, which permits moving only.
F moves the camera when nothing is selected — with an empty selection it resets to the default view rather than doing nothing. Alt+F steps back to where the view was.

Scene Objects — the same objects as a tree

Inspector — the selected object's settings