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Mesh Morpher documentation

The Viewport

7 pages · exported 2026-09-11 · https://meshmorpher.com/docs/studio-and-graph/viewport

Studio and Graph

The Viewport

The two preview panes: how to move the camera, what the menus over the view do, and what every overlay is telling you.

Mesh Morpher previews the mesh in two 3D panes: Viewport and Target Viewport. Viewport (also called the Source pane) shows whichever node is currently selected in the graph; Target Viewport is a second, independent pane for comparing a result against a reference mesh side by side. The two panes share the same chrome - camera controls, view modes, grid and floor, overlays and the Capture dropdown - so everything under this section applies to either pane unless a page says otherwise.

  • Navigating - the three camera schemes and their gestures, WASDQE fly, mouse-wheel behaviour, the numpad projection shortcuts, and how Focus (F) frames the mesh.
  • View Modes - Lit, Wireframe and the rest of the View Mode menu, the Disable Shadows toggle, and the Buffer Visualization sub-menu.
  • Camera and Display - every row on the Camera Speed panel, the Background Color and Wireframe Color swatches, and Reset Defaults.
  • Projection, Grid and Floor - the Perspective / orthographic combo, Show Grid and Show Floor.
  • Overlays and Readouts - the pane badge, FPS pill, mesh stats dropdown, camera lock, axis gizmo, light widget and the Accept/Cancel banner.
  • Capture: Images and Turntables - saving a still image or rendering an orbiting turntable sequence.

Studio and Graph › The Viewport

Navigating

Camera schemes, the fly controls, the projection shortcuts and exactly what Focus does in each case.

Camera schemes

Mesh Morpher ships three camera navigation presets. Pick one under Settings > Shortcuts > Camera scheme (see Shortcuts); the active preset changes what plain LMB and the modifier combos do, and the on-screen hint strip below follows it in spirit, though its own text is keyed to projection, not preset (see below).

  • Mesh Morpher (default) - "Alt+LMB orbit, Alt+RMB zoom, MMB or LMB+RMB pan, wheel zoom. Hold RMB to look around and fly with WASDQE; a plain LMB drag walks the camera."
  • Maya - "Alt+LMB tumble, Alt+MMB pan, Alt+RMB zoom, wheel zoom. Plain LMB is left to the active tool. Hold RMB to look around and fly with WASDQE."
  • Blender - "MMB orbit, Shift+MMB pan, Ctrl+MMB zoom, wheel zoom. LMB (including Alt+LMB) always goes to the active tool. Hold RMB to look around and fly with WASDQE."

Holding RMB to look around and fly with WASDQE works the same way under all three presets - it is what changes between them (plain LMB, and what the Alt / Shift / Ctrl modifiers do) that defines a scheme.

On-screen hint strip

A hint strip sits bottom-centre in each pane, on its own row. It shows the gestures available for the pane's current projection, not the chosen camera scheme - the text is the same regardless of which of the three presets above is active:

  • Perspective: WASD walk - RMB look - Alt+LMB orbit - MMB pan - Wheel zoom - F focus
  • Orthographic: MMB pan - Wheel zoom - F focus

The strip is hidden whenever a tool is active; the Accept / Cancel banner takes over that row instead.

WASDQE fly

Command Default key
Move Forward W
Move Backward S
Strafe Left A
Strafe Right D
Move Up E
Move Down Q

These six commands only act while the right mouse button is held. The same hold also drives RMB free-look, so holding RMB and dragging while tapping WASDQE is how you fly through the scene; release RMB and the keys do nothing in the viewport. All six are rebindable under Shortcuts.

Mouse wheel

The wheel does two different things depending on whether RMB is held:

  • Wheel + RMB held - adjusts Camera Speed by plus or minus 10% per notch, clamped to 50 - 50000. That clamp is narrower than the Camera Speed spin box's own 1 - 100000 range (see Camera and Display), so scrolling alone cannot push the value as high, or as low, as typing a value directly into the spin box can.
  • Wheel alone - dollies the camera forward (or back, scrolling the other way) by half the current Camera Speed per notch. That half-of-Camera-Speed multiplier is fixed and has no control of its own.

Numpad projection shortcuts

Key View
Numpad 0 Perspective (default)
Numpad 1 Front
Numpad 2 Back
Numpad 3 Left
Numpad 4 Right
Numpad 5 Top
Numpad 6 Bottom

Projection is remembered per pane, so the Source and Target panes can sit in different views at once. These shortcuts set the same value as the Perspective combo; see Projection, Grid and Floor.

Focus (F)

F (Frame Selection) behaves differently depending on what is under the cursor and which projection the pane is in:

  1. If a sculpt brush is hovering the mesh (Source pane only) and the pane is in perspective, F recentres the camera on the point under the cursor without changing how far away it is.
  2. Same case in orthographic: F recentres on the cursor point and also refits the frame width to the Focus Width (Ortho) setting multiplied by the mesh radius.
  3. Otherwise, F frames the whole mesh's bounding box. In perspective this uses the Focus Padding (Persp) setting to decide how loose the framing is.
  4. With no mesh loaded, F falls back to a fixed point 50 units above the origin, framed at a 200-unit radius.

Every case flies the camera there smoothly rather than cutting instantly. Focus Padding (Persp) and Focus Width (Ortho) are both set on the Camera and Display page.

Camera read-out pill

A pill at the bottom-left of each pane always shows the live camera transform:

Field Shows Colour
Pos X / Y / Z position red / green / blue
Rot Pitch / Yaw / Roll, in degrees red / blue / green

A reset button on the pill puts the camera back to its default framing - the same framing logic as Focus (F) above, using the Focus Padding / Focus Width settings, and falling back to the fixed default vantage if no mesh is loaded in perspective. Its tooltip is "Reset camera to default framing", with whatever key is currently bound to Frame Selection appended after it.

Studio and Graph › The Viewport

View Modes

Lit, Unlit, Wireframe and the rest, the shadow switch, and the buffer slices you can display instead.

The View Mode combo's button label is the name of the pane's current mode. View mode is set per pane, so the Source and Target panes can each show a different one at the same time.

Modes

A pane starts in Lit, and the mode you leave it in is remembered between launches. None of the entries below carry a tooltip - the label is the only description the app gives for each one.

  • Lit
  • Unlit
  • Wireframe
  • Detail Lighting
  • Lighting Only
  • Light Complexity
  • Shader Complexity
  • Stationary Light Overlap
  • Lightmap Density
  • Reflections
  • Buffer Visualization

Disable Shadows

A checkbox lower in the same menu, off by default. Tooltip:

"Persistently disable all dynamic shadow casting in the preview viewport. Useful for dense meshes where the shadow pass dominates frame time."

This is independent of which view mode is active - it stays off or on as you switch modes.

Buffer Visualization sub-menu

Below Disable Shadows, a Buffer Visualization sub-menu lets you pick which GBuffer slice to display. Its tooltip:

"Pick which GBuffer slice to display when in Buffer Visualization mode"

Picking any slice in this sub-menu also switches the pane's view mode to Buffer Visualization - you do not need to select that mode separately first. The slices, in menu order, are radio entries with no tooltips of their own:

  • Base Color
  • Metallic
  • Specular
  • Roughness
  • World Normal
  • Ambient Occlusion
  • Scene Depth
  • Opacity
  • Custom Depth

Studio and Graph › The Viewport

Camera and Display

Every camera and display value the viewport panel exposes, with its default, its range and whether it applies to one pane or both.

The Camera Speed: N pill opens a panel of spin-box rows rather than a drop-down list. Every row has its own reset arrow that only appears once the value differs from its default - its tooltip is "Restore this value to its default" - and every edit saves to disk as soon as you commit it.

Most rows here are shared: changing them affects the Source and Target panes together. A few are kept per pane instead, so the Source and Target panes can each hold a different value. Each table below says which.

Camera group

Every row in this group is shared between both panes, except Field of View, which is per pane.

Setting What it does Default Range
Camera Speed WASDQE fly speed, LMB drag-walk and wheel-dolly distance, in world units per second 600 1 - 100000 (drag: 50 - 5000)
Orbit Sensitivity Degrees of yaw/pitch per pixel of Alt+LMB orbit 0.4 0.001 - 100 (drag: 0.05 - 2)
Look Sensitivity Degrees per pixel of RMB free-look 0.25 0.001 - 100 (drag: 0.05 - 2)
Pan Multiplier Multiplier on the distance-scaled pan speed 1.0 0.001 - 100 (drag: 0.1 - 4)
Invert Pan Checkbox. Off: the camera follows the mouse while panning. On: dragging grabs the canvas - content follows the mouse instead. Applies to both perspective and ortho. off -
Field of View Camera vertical field of view, in degrees (perspective only) - per pane 70 1 - 170 (drag: 5 - 170)
Min Camera Distance Floor on camera-to-pivot distance, so dolly cannot collapse into the mesh 100 1 - 100000 (drag: 10 - 1000)
Ortho Zoom Sensitivity Ortho wheel-zoom exponent per wheel notch 0.0004166667 (= 1/2400) 0.00001 - 0.01 (drag: 0.0001 - 0.002)
Drag-Walk Speed Plain-LMB drag-walk forward speed, world units per pixel of vertical drag 8.0 0.1 - 100 (drag: 1 - 30)
Drag-Walk Yaw Plain-LMB drag-walk yaw, degrees per pixel of horizontal drag 0.5 0.01 - 10 (drag: 0.1 - 2)
Focus Padding (Persp) Framing padding Focus (F) uses in perspective - higher frames looser 1.2 1 - 5 (drag: 1 - 3)
Focus Width (Ortho) Ortho frame-width multiplier (x mesh radius) Focus (F) uses 2.4 1 - 10 (drag: 1.5 - 5)

The "drag" figure in the Range column is only how far the on-screen slider travels; typing a value still reaches the full range to its left.

See Navigating for what these drive in practice, and Focus (F) for how the two Focus settings are used.

Viewport group

Exposure, Render Scale, Near Clip and Far Clip are kept per pane. Background Color and Wireframe Color are shared.

Setting What it does Default Range
Exposure (Brightness) Manual auto-exposure bias; 11 is the mid-grey baseline - per pane 11.0 0 - 20 (drag: 5 - 15)
Render Scale (Supersample) Render-resolution multiplier; 1.0 is native - per pane 1.5 0.5 - 2 (drag: 0.75 - 2)
Near Clip Near clip plane, world units - per pane 1.0 0.01 - 1000 (drag: 0.1 - 10)
Far Clip Far clip plane, world units - per pane 1000000 1000 - 1000000000 (drag: 100000 - 10000000)
Background Color Colour swatch; opens the colour picker (no alpha) #21242A -
Wireframe Color Colour swatch; opens the colour picker (no alpha). Colours the mesh's wireframe overlay #4FA3FF -

Reset Defaults

A button at the bottom-right of the panel puts every value above back to its shipped default in one click, plus two values that have no row anywhere in the app:

  • Camera Speed 600, Orbit Sensitivity 0.4, Look Sensitivity 0.25, Pan Multiplier 1.0, Min Camera Distance 100, Ortho Zoom Sensitivity 1/2400, Drag-Walk Speed 8.0, Drag-Walk Yaw 0.5, Focus Padding (Persp) 1.2, Focus Width (Ortho) 2.4.
  • This pane's Field of View 70, Exposure 11, Render Scale 1.5, Near Clip 1, Far Clip 1000000.
  • Background Color returns to the current theme's panel colour - not necessarily the hex value shown above. If you have changed Panel background on the Theme page, Reset Defaults here follows that colour instead of the shipped one.

Two of the values this button restores have no spin box anywhere in the app: the plain mouse-wheel's dolly distance (a fixed fraction of Camera Speed) and the plain-LMB drag-dolly distance. Reset Defaults is the only way to put either one back deliberately.

Reset Defaults also resets Sky Light Intensity back to 1.0, even though that setting has no slider on this panel.

Studio and Graph › The Viewport

Projection, Grid and Floor

Perspective and the six orthographic views, which grid plane each one draws, and why the floor disappears in ortho.

Perspective combo

The same pill that shows the pane's projection - Perspective, Top, Bottom, Left, Right, Front or Back - also holds the Show Grid and Show Floor toggles below. Perspective is the default projection; the six orthographic views sit under an Orthographic section header. None of the projection entries carry a tooltip. Projection is set per pane, and each has its own numpad shortcut - see Navigating.

Switching to an orthographic view for the first time frames a default width of 400 world units.

Show Grid

Checkbox, default on. Tooltip:

"Toggle the world-grid overlay in perspective mode."

Show Floor

Checkbox, default on. Tooltip:

"Toggle the studio floor mesh in perspective mode. Ortho views never render the floor."

Which grid plane shows where

The grid is drawn as three separate planes - one each for XY, XZ and YZ - and only the plane facing you is ever visible:

Projection Grid plane shown
Perspective, Top, Bottom XY
Front, Back XZ
Left, Right YZ

Turning Show Grid off hides all three planes at once, whichever one would otherwise be showing.

Ortho never draws the floor

The studio floor is a flat mesh that never casts a shadow. It is hidden unconditionally in every orthographic view, regardless of the Show Floor setting, and is additionally hidden in perspective whenever Show Floor is off. In other words, the only way to see the floor at all is perspective projection with Show Floor on.

Studio and Graph › The Viewport

Overlays and Readouts

The pane badge, frame rate, mesh statistics, camera lock, axis gizmo, light widget and the rest of the chrome drawn over the view.

Both panes draw the same set of overlays on top of the 3D view. Some are always on; others only appear in specific conditions.

Overlay Text shown When it appears
Pane badge SOURCE / TARGET Always, top-left of each pane.
FPS pill the frame rate, FPS, the frame time, ms, and a colour dot Always, top-left, just below the pane badge. The dot and digits are green at 60 FPS or higher, amber from 30 to 60, and red below 30.
Sculpt-data pill "Preparing sculpt data..." Top-centre, while this pane's mesh has GPU sculpt buffers requested but not yet ready.
Turntable pill "Turntable: {status}" plus a Cancel button Top-centre, while a turntable render is running for this pane. Cancel's tooltip is "Stop after the current frame. Frames already written are kept and the camera is restored."
Camera lock button icon only, no text Always visible; see Camera lock below.
Reference-mesh eye icon only, no text Source pane only, and only when this pane actually has a reference mesh loaded; see Reference-mesh eye below.
Axis gizmo the letters X, Y, Z Always, bottom-left, just above the camera read-out pill.
Light widget a vertical slider plus a rotation globe Always, bottom-right; see Light widget below.
Accept / Cancel banner Accept and Cancel buttons Bottom-centre, only while a tool is active - the same row the navigation hint strip otherwise occupies.

Camera lock

The icon tints to the theme's accent colour when locked on, and dims to grey when off. It starts off and persists across sessions.

State Tooltip
ON "Camera lock ON - Source / Target cameras move together. Click to unlock."
OFF "Camera lock OFF - Source / Target cameras move independently. Click to lock."

Reference-mesh eye

This button only appears on the Source pane, and only once the Scene outliner has a Reference Mesh row pointing at something for this pane - otherwise it is not drawn at all. Clicking it does the same thing as toggling visibility on that Scene row.

State Tooltip
Hidden "Reference mesh hidden - click to show."
Visible "Reference mesh visible - click to hide."

Axis gizmo

Three short lines radiating from a centre dot, labelled X, Y and Z, about 28 px across. The axes are drawn back-to-front, so whichever ones face the camera are brighter. Colours are themeable (see Orientation gizmo on the Theme page); the shipped defaults are red for X, green for Y and blue for Z.

Mesh Stats

The Mesh Stats pill's label never changes. Opening it rebuilds a small read-out panel from whichever mesh belongs to this pane - the Source pane's primary mesh, or the Target pane's secondary mesh.

Row Meaning
Mesh Statistics Panel title, centred.
Vertex Count: Vertex count.
Triangle Count: Triangle count.
Edge Count: Edge count.
UV Channels: Number of UV layers; 0 if the mesh has no attributes.
Bone Count: Number of bones; 0 if the mesh has no bones.

Two empty states replace the whole dropdown with a single line of text instead:

  • "No mesh available" - there is no mesh component for this pane at all.
  • "Mesh is empty" - a mesh component exists but has zero vertices.

Light widget

A translucent pill at the bottom-right holds two controls, both always visible:

  • Intensity slider - vertical, range 0 to 5, default 1.0. Tooltip: "Directional key light intensity. Drag to brighten / dim the main light (Persona default 1.0). The SkyLight provides constant ambient fill."
  • Rotation globe - about 40 px across. Tooltip: "Drag to rotate the sun. Mouse-wheel adjusts pitch. Double-click to reset." It paints the cardinal letters F, B, R and L on its face, and prints the current yaw and pitch as whole-degree numbers labelled Y: and P:. Default rotation is pitch -50, yaw -75.

Accept / Cancel banner

Appears bottom-centre only while a tool is active.

Button Tooltip
Accept "Apply the active tool's pending changes and propagate the result to the node's output pin(s)."
Cancel "Discard the active tool's pending changes and exit the tool without writing to the node's output pin(s)."

Studio and Graph › The Viewport

Capture: Images and Turntables

Save the viewport as a PNG or JPEG at up to four times its on-screen size, or render an orbiting turntable as a numbered sequence.

The Capture pill's tooltip sums up both of its sections:

"Save this viewport as a PNG / JPEG at up to 4x its on-screen resolution, or render an orbiting turntable as a numbered image sequence."

Every value in the dropdown persists between sessions.

Save Viewport Image

Setting What it does Default / values
Resolution Combo. Shows as <multiplier>x - <resolved width> x <resolved height>; menu entries read <multiplier>x (<width> x <height>). The resolved pixel size is clamped to your graphics card's maximum 2D texture dimension. Multipliers 1, 2, 4; default 2
Format Combo. The pill itself just says PNG or JPEG; the menu spells out "PNG (lossless, supports alpha)" and "JPEG (smaller, no alpha)". Default PNG
JPEG Quality Spin box. Only shown when Format is JPEG. Default 95; range 1 - 100 (drag: 50 - 100)
Transparent Background Checkbox, disabled unless Format is PNG. Tooltip: "Removes the HDRI backdrop, floor and grid from the render and keeps the alpha channel, so the mesh can be composited over anything. The sky light still lights and reflects on the mesh. PNG only - JPEG has no alpha channel." Default off
Hide Tool Overlays Checkbox. Tooltip: "Leave the brush indicator, stamp planes and symmetry plane out of the saved image." Default on
Save Image... Primary button. Disabled while a turntable is rendering. Opens a native save dialog titled "Save Viewport Image", filtered to PNG Image (*.png) or JPEG Image (*.jpg). The extension you actually type in that dialog wins over whatever the Format combo says. -

The save dialog defaults to a folder under your Documents directory, with the file named MeshMorpher_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.

On success, a toast titled "Viewport image saved" shows the resolution and path as its subtext, formatted <width> x <height> - <path>. On failure the toast is titled "Save image failed"; if the pane has no size yet (for example, before any mesh has been opened) the message is "The preview viewport has no size yet - open a mesh and try again."

Turntable (image sequence)

Setting What it does Default / values
Frames Spin box; number of stills to render. Default 36; range 2 - 360 (drag max 120)
Degrees / Frame Spin box; camera yaw step between frames. Default 10.0; range 0.1 - 90 (drag: 1 - 45, step 0.5)
(read-out) "Total sweep: {0} degrees" - Frames multiplied by Degrees / Frame, rounded. -
Render Turntable... Primary button, hidden while a job is already running. Opens a save dialog titled "Turntable output - frames are numbered from this name". -
(while running) Status text, a progress bar, and a Cancel button. -

Turntable frames default to the same Documents folder and MeshMorpher_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS base name as a single saved image, numbered from whatever name you give the sequence.

On failure, the toast is titled "Turntable failed to start"; if the preview scene itself is not ready yet, the subtext reads "The preview scene is not available."