3D and texture views

Three layouts, switched from the toolbar or with a key:

Layout	Key	Shows
3D view	Q	The model, full width
Split view	W	Both panes at once
Texture view	E	The UV canvas, full width

On a phone the split stacks vertically instead of side by side, so both panes keep a usable width.

3D view

The model under the current render mode, lit by the environment. The triangle and material stats sit in the corner, and the camera tool frames its shots here.

Texture view

A canvas showing one material's UV layout drawn as a white wireframe over the texture in the channel you've selected, inside the UV unit square.

• Pan and zoom to inspect an island closely.
• Space or F recenters the view. On touch, double-tap.
• Textures draw with nearest-neighbour sampling, so individual texels stay crisp instead of blurring into each other when you zoom right in — which is the difference between seeing a texel boundary and guessing at it.

Two pickers above the canvas choose what you're looking at: which material, and which channel of it. The base color of the body material is what you get by default.

The picker also decides where dropped files land. Drop a texture anywhere — the viewport included — and it goes to whatever material and channel the panel currently has in view, so you don't have to aim.

Split view

Both panes, and the reason it exists: hovering the UV canvas puts a marker on the model.

Move the cursor across an island in the texture view and a dot tracks the matching point on the mesh in 3D. That answers the question a UV layout can't on its own — which part of the car is this island? — without unwrapping anything or assigning a temporary material.

It reads in the useful direction. Going from the model to the UVs is easy enough by eye; going from an unfamiliar island back to the part it wraps is the hard one, and that's what this does.

TIP

Pair it with the UV Checker render mode. The checker shows you that an area is stretched; the split view then shows you which island to fix.

Next: render modes.