Workspace and navigation
Use camera controls, shortcuts, shared themes and persistent panels.
Right-drag or Alt+left-drag rotates the surface, middle-drag pans, and the wheel zooms. The view cube orients and frames visible models. C starts picking a rotation centre; F fits the view. T/A start trace/outline mapping, P/L start point/length measurement, E opens geometry editing and F2 renames the selection.
Quick measurements report coordinates, deltas and lengths without adding project records. Cancelling a quick-measure or rotation-centre pick restores a paused mapping draft. Workspace Escape cancels the active workflow and clears selection; Escape in a focused editor or dialog stays with that surface.
View provides checked left sidebar, right sidebar and Measurements controls. Panels preserve their drafts and cameras while hidden. Resize Measurements from its separator and columns from their headers. Layout preferences belong to this browser, outside project history.
Use the shared Light, Dark and System modes and Configure Themes.... Theme preview changes both canvases; Apply commits, while Cancel, Escape or close restores the opening settings. View → Display Settings... separately controls domain display and navigation preferences.
F1 and Help → Documentation open this website manual in a new tab. Reading the manual requires an internet connection.
Surface quality
Use Display Settings → Appearance → Surface to adjust how scans look. The controls preview immediately; Apply saves them, while Cancel, Escape or closing the window restores the opening values. Defaults previews the standard settings until you apply them. Settings apply to every model in this browser and do not edit your project or photographs.
| Control | Behaviour | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Texture colours | Photograph colours displays the image without an extra material tint. Imported material tint applies the OBJ material's colour multiplier, which may darken the photograph. Untextured surfaces keep their material colours. | Photograph colours |
| Brightness | Adjust photographic surfaces from 50–200%. This leaves the background, measurements and orientation colours unchanged. | 100% |
| Shading strength | Adjust the balance of uniform illumination and light following the camera. At 0%, inspect colours without directional shading; higher values emphasise surface relief. Photographed shadows remain part of the image. | 85% |
Brightness and texture-colour controls are disabled while viewing dip, dip direction or orientation colours; their values are retained when you return to Texture. Shading strength applies to every surface appearance mode. Calibration rotates the model and its normals together, and the light continues to follow the camera.
Open Display Settings → Navigation / Performance to control surface detail. The default CPU cache is 320 MiB and the GPU model cache is 384 MiB. If this browser has older saved limits, choose Defaults, review the settings and select Apply to use the larger allowances. These preferences belong to the browser, not the project.
Photographs retain their original detail. JMapper prepares a local texture-tile cache, then loads the areas needed for the current view. A coverage image stays visible while preparation or page loading is in progress. The status bar shows preparation progress until the cache is ready, without replacing the result of your last command. Close views can use the original photograph's pixels, including 32K source images, within the selected memory limits.
The first preparation on a computer takes extra time and local storage. Subsequent openings reuse the cache. Portable .jmap files keep the original photographs, so another computer can rebuild the cache without the original OBJ folder. Clearing browser storage removes the local cache; it can be rebuilt from a saved project. If storage is insufficient, the status bar reports it and coverage imagery remains available.
Navigation preserves loaded detail while the camera moves. Surface screen error (px) controls detail during movement and at rest: smaller values request finer geometry, subject to cache space. Detail changes use hysteresis to avoid repeated switching near a threshold. Lighting follows the camera to reveal surface relief. Display scaling reaches up to 2× where the framebuffer budget permits it.
Enable Show viewport performance diagnostics to see rendered triangles, coverage and source dimensions, resident texture pages, canvas resolution and refinement limits. A small coverage image does not mean that the full-resolution source has been discarded; detailed pages stream separately. Lowering cache limits reduces memory use and may reduce detail. Display changes do not alter original triangles, measurements or calibration.