Skip to main content

Changing the View

CrystalExplorer allows you to rotate, zoom in/out and translate so that you can achieve a particular orientation of the structure.

The easiest way to zoom in/out is to use the scroll wheel on your mouse.

View modes​

CrystalExplorer has three modes:

  • Rotate ,
  • Zoom
  • Translate

which may be selected using the main toolbar.

By default CrystalExplorer starts in the rotation mode. To rotate the structure, left-click in the graphics windows in the background, and drag the mouse around.

Since left-clicking is also used to selected atoms/molecules is important to only left-click on the background if you want to change the view.

When in the rotation mode it is also possible to rotate about the z-axis (out the screen) by holding down the Shift key and left-click-dragging the mouse.

The View Toolbar​

The view toolbar appears the the bottom of the graphics window:

viewtoolbar.png

Using the view toolbar, you can precisely rotate or scale the structure. Or, you can choose a view down one of the crystallographic axes a, b or c. The Recenter button resets the center of rotation to be at the center of the atoms displayed. Recentering is useful after a large, asymmetrical cluster has been created.

tip

When one of the rotation angle boxes in the toolbar is highlighted, you can rotate about this axis by hovering the mouse over the angle box and rotating the mouse wheel.