Plan.City London how-to series 9: Updated Navigation Guide

In this updated guide, we'll take a fresh look at navigation inside Plan City London 2.1, including several new systems and improvements that have been added since the original navigation tutorial. As Plan City has evolved, navigating the city has become more flexible, more precise, and far more tailored to different workflows. Whether you want to quickly move between landmarks, orbit around buildings like in traditional 3D software, or freely fly across the city, the app now offers several ways to move around the environment. Let's start with one of the most useful additions, the Goto system. To access it, click on the navigation button in the main menu bar and select the Goto option. Immediately, you'll notice several large vertical beams appearing throughout the city. These beams represent curated landmarks distributed across a playable area. Clicking on any of them will instantly move you near that location, making it much easier to quickly traverse the model without manually flying there. Beyond these visual markers, the panel also allows us to search for locations directly. We can type the names of buildings, bridges, museums, or other landmarks into the search box at the bottom of the panel. Selecting one of the returned results will once again move us close to that location. And there's more. If your organization has access to a Google API key, you can enter it through the app info section of the settings panel. Doing so enables address and postcode search functionality, allowing plan city to retrieve more specific realworld locations directly from Google services. This makes navigation significantly faster when working on real projects. Now that we've covered the go-to system, let's revisit the two main control methods available inside the app. The first one is the drone mode, still the default navigation method in Plan City. This control scheme gives us complete freedom of movement throughout the environment. Use the WASD keys to move horizontally across the city and the Q and E keys to move down and up vertically, and move the mouse to freely look around. If you ever need to interact with the user interface, press the escape key to release the mouse cursor. While the cursor is visible, you can still move through the scene using the keyboard and rotate the camera by holding one of the mouse buttons whilst moving the mouse. Movement speed can also be adjusted dynamically while navigating. Holding shift increases movement speed, while holding control slows the camera down for more precise movement. Inside the drone panel itself, we'll also find dedicated controls for adjusting movement speed, modifying the mouse sensitivity, resetting the player position, and reading a quick explanation of the controls. An important improvement in version 2.1 is that these settings are now saved automatically between sessions. Now, let's switch to the second control method: the overview character. This navigation system behaves more like traditional 3D software such as 3ds Max, Maya, Blender, or Google Maps. To activate it, select "switch to overview mode" from the overview panel. Unlike the drone mode, the mouse cursor is always available here. Movement is handled entirely through the mouse. You can hold the left mouse button and drag to pan. You can use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. You can hold the middle mouse button to orbit around the scene—that is, provided your mouse has a middle mouse button. If it doesn't, you can also orbit by holding Alt and dragging with the left mouse button. One of the biggest improvements in this mode is the amount of customization now available. Inside the overview panel, we can adjust several advanced options. "Orbit around screen center" changes whether the orbit pivot is based on the center of the screen or the mouse location. The "invert vertical orbit controls" flips the vertical camera movement. Next, "zoom towards mouse" changes whether zooming in focuses on the cursor location or just the center of the screen. Then we can also adjust the setting that controls whether to instantly zoom, to remove the smooth zoom animation and jump directly to the target. These settings make the controls significantly more adaptable depending on your workflow. Finally, before we finish, it's worth mentioning the contextual menu. Right-clicking on objects in the scene will reveal a small helper menu containing options such as "go here" and "reset position." Additional options might also appear depending on what objects you click. This is a fast way to navigate without needing to open panels. And that brings us to the end of this updated navigation guide. Whether you prefer flying freely across a city, navigating like in a CAD application, or instantly jumping between locations, Plan City London 2.1 now offers a much more complete navigation experience. Thanks for watching, and see you in the next video.