Many people out there are daunted by the Blender interface. But what steered me away at first was the way the navigation worked. In Blender 2.5 Alpha 1 it’s better, but not perfect. Here’s how to sort that out.

Step 1. Just change on of the windows to a “User Preferences” window with thw window selector.

Step 2.Make sure “Zoom to Mouse” and “Rotate around” is selected.

Step 3.Uncheck “Global Pivot” to prevent confusion.

In a Nutshell, this will allow you to zoom to the mouse pointer with the mouse wheel, and rotate around the selected object/edge/face/vertex only.

Optionally, I like to beef the Smooth value up to 500 and sometimes select “Auto Perspect”. This will automatically change the view mode to Orthographic whenever you are in Top, Bottom, Left, or Right view modes. And change it to Perspective whenever viewing from any other angle.