UDK: Viewports

Go ahead and open up UDK. Once it’s fully opened up you should a hell of a lot of different controls and buttons.
Don’t worry about half of them – for now, just look at the main portion of the screen (the centre).
You should see either four areas (three of which look like a square on a grid) or a big blue grid with a red square on. If you see the latter then click the button that looks very much likes the windows restore button in the top right-hand corner to get all four areas. These areas are called viewports.
The bottom left (by default) viewport, is the Perspective viewport. This is what you’d expect to see when making things. So if you made a cube in UDK – you’d see that cube in the perspective viewport. It’s the only viewport actually in 3D and can be customised using various options to adjust to your needs (we will cover this in the next tutorial).
You can navigate around your perspective viewport in a variety of methods. Hold right click in the viewport and move your mouse around to change your view angle (much like a first-person shooter) – you can then use WASD when holding right click to navigate around your scene. Holding left click and moving your mouse around on the other hand pans back and forward, and holding both mouse buttons and moving around pans up and down.
You can use any of these methods to navigate around your scene in the perspective viewport, I personally prefer the WASD method.

The other viewports are ‘simplified’ versions of your 3D scene. The top left hand viewport is the side view, the top right is the front view and the bottom right is the top (overhead) viewport. The following image demonstrates the viewports for a set of stairs.
The different views are useful for different things – but basically all of the viewports are very helpful. You’ll often want to make different tweaks using different viewports to make things a lot easier for yourself and to make sure everything fits nicely.


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