The two viewports, the camera, shading and heatmap modes, playback and the clip list — everything you use to look at a LOD and judge it.
The left viewport always shows the original mesh; the right one shows the level selected in the LOD table. Both play the same animation frame and share one camera, so any difference you see is the LOD.
The toolbar above the viewports has Fit to window, Reset camera, Joints basis (joint axes), Show grid, and the layout choice Single view / Side by side. Fit to window frames the mesh and keeps the direction you are looking from; Reset camera also turns the camera back to the start direction (see Camera).
| Mouse | Action |
|---|---|
| Left-drag | Orbit |
| Right-drag | Pan |
| Wheel | Zoom. Close to the mesh the steps can be large — one or two notches at a time. |
Camera sensitivity and behaviour are configured in Settings > Navigation, together with the start direction: Reset camera yaw and Reset camera pitch. A newly loaded mesh and the Reset camera button start from that direction.
A saved project keeps the camera: loading the project brings the view back once the mesh has loaded. A mesh you load on its own always starts from the start direction.
View > Camera shows the camera while you move it: the direction (yaw around the model, pitch above or below it, in degrees), the distance from the point it looks at, and that point (target). The dialog can stay open while you work. Use it to come back to an exact view, for example for screenshots or to compare two LODs from the same angle.
| Button | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Use current | Put the current camera into the text field, ready to edit. |
| Apply (or Enter) | Move the camera to the values in the text field. |
| Copy | Copy the current camera to the clipboard as one line of text. |
| Paste | Take a camera line from the clipboard and apply it. |
| Reset | The same as the Reset camera button. |
The text looks like yaw=210 pitch=-25 distance=3.1 target=0,0.95,0. Values you leave out keep their
current value, so yaw=180 alone turns the camera around the model and changes nothing else. If
a value cannot be read, the dialog says so in red for a few seconds and the camera does not move.
Each viewport has its own toolbar, so the original and the LOD can be shown differently (for example textured original, heatmap LOD):
| Button | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Texturing | Show the character's texture. If the shading box says Textured but the mesh is grey, turn this on. |
| Wireframe | Overlay the triangle edges — shows where the simplifier kept detail. |
| Lights | Lit or flat shading. |
| Skeleton rendering | Draw the joints and bones. |
| Face culling | Hide back faces. |
| Smooth Normals | Recompute smooth vertex normals for display. |
| Shading box | See Shading modes. |
| Padded (LOD viewport) | Show the texture repaired in the Atlas Editor instead of the original. |
The shading box of the LOD viewport offers Textured, Checkerboard (reveals UV stretching), Normals, and two heatmaps:
Blue is little deviation; green, yellow and red are progressively more. The colour range is set in Settings > Silhouette error visualization.
The playback bar has the Clip dropdown, the frame counter, previous / play / pause / next / loop, and a frame slider. The deviation timeline below it is covered in Animation-aware refinement.
The Clip dropdown chooses what the player plays: one clip, All clips, Selected clips (the ticked clips) or Selected ranges (the ticked ranges of ticked clips). The numbers in brackets count them. Choosing an entry pauses the player until you press play again.
