Setting Up Blender's First Person Controls

Setting Up Blender's First Person Controls

I love Blender as a 3D package, and its ‘Industry Compatible’ keymap is much appreciated, but it’s missing one thing - first person camera controls.

Each time I go back to Blender after using Unreal, Unity, or a number of other 3D packages, I orbit around using standard Maya controls (Alt plus the mouse buttons), but then at some point I try to rotate the view in first person by holding the right mouse button, which instead shows the context menu. This can be a pain when working on any scene larger than a single object.

Thankfully, Blender does have a first person camera mode - but there’s no way I’m going to find it in the View menu or use some custom keyboard shortcut each time I want to invoke it, and I don’t want to have to confirm or cancel the operation, especially now that I’ve gotten used to quickly using first-person controls by pressing the right mouse button, and then returning to normal by releasing it.

This is where Blender’s excellent keybinding support comes to the rescue! With a couple tweaks to the keymap (Edit > Preferences > Keymap), we can get that super quick first-person control we enjoy in other software.

I started with the Industry Compatible keymap, and made the following tweaks, among others:

• In the 3D View > 3D View (Global) section, I added a new binding for view3d.walk, bound to Mouse > Right Mouse, on Press. This activates the first-person controls when the right mouse button is pressed.
• In the 3D View > View3D Walk Modal section, I disabled the Cancel binding bound to Mouse > Right Mouse, and rebound the Confirm mouse binding to Mouse > Right Mouse, on Release. This immediately finishes the first-person looking when the right mouse button is released, rather than having to manually confirm or cancel the action.
• Finally, I switched to Key-Binding search mode to search for right mouse and removed a number of bindings for context menus in the 3D viewport, including the ones for Grease Pencil, Weight Paint, Vertex Paint, Pose, Object Mode, Sculpt, Mesh, etc. I never invoke the right click menu from the viewport anyway, so this was no loss for me.

With the keybindings set up, everything was feeling great! Or rather, almost everything. The first-person movement speed felt too sluggish to me, and the fast mode (when holding Shift) was too fast. Not to worry - those are configurable under Edit > Preferences > Navigation > Fly & Walk > Walk. I set my Walk Speed to 3.5 m/s, and my Speed Factor to 3.0. This feels much more like what I’m used to, when working with scenes where 1 unit is 1 meter.