Blender For Dummies (2015)

Part I

Getting Started with Blender

Chapter 2

Understanding How Blender Thinks

In This Chapter

Familiarizing yourself with Blender's windows

Adjusting Blender's interface to fit the way you work

Working in three-dimensional space

Using the regions in the 3D View

It's time to get intimate with Blender. No, I don't mean you need to start placing scented candles around your computer. I mean that this chapter's focus is a detailed introduction to Blender's interface and how you can start finding your way around in it. First of all, it's pretty important to have an understanding of the various types of editors that Blender has and how to access them. These editors are the gateways and tools for creating whatever you want.

With the knowledge of what you can do with these editors, the next thing is actually building those creations. To do so, you need to understand how to work in a virtual three-dimensional space, and specifically, you need to understand how Blender handles that space. I also cover these topics in this chapter.

Looking at Editor Types

In many ways, Blender isn't so much one program as it is a bunch of different programs sharing the same interface and access to the same data. Thinking of it this way, each of Blender's editor types is kind of its own little program in a Blender area.

A Blender area can contain any editor type. You can see what editor types are available by left-clicking the button on the far left of that editor's header. Figure 2-1 shows the menu that appears when you press this button.

Figure 2-1: The Editor Type menu.

Each editor type serves a specific purpose, but you can organize them into four basic categories: animation editors, 2D editors, general editors, and miscellaneous editors. The menu shown in Figure 2-1 attempts to organize the editors according to these categories. The exception to this is the 3D View. Technically, it should probably be among the general editors, but since it's used most frequently, it has a distinguished position as the first option in the list.

Menus in Blender

You may have noticed that I refer to the 3D View as the “first” item in the Editor Type menu, even though in Figure 2-1, it's at the bottom of the menu. This is due to a somewhat unique quirk of Blender's menus. They're designed to help you by keeping the distance you need to move your mouse cursor as short as possible. In practice, this means that when you open a menu from an editor's header near the bottom of the Blender window, it flows upward with the first menu item at the bottom, closest to your mouse cursor. When you open a header menu near the top of the Blender window, it flows downward and the first item is at the top.

For floating menus like the Add (Shift+A) menu in the 3D View (covered in Chapter 4), the behavior is a little bit different. Those menus always list the first item at the top; however, Blender remembers the last item you picked in any of these floating menus and automatically places that item under your mouse cursor. Again, this is for speedy workflow. The idea is that if you chose one menu item last time, it's likely that you want to pick it again this time. To reduce the distance you have to move the mouse cursor, Blender facilitates this notion by jumping directly to the last menu item you chose.

The following subsections give you an overview of each editor, organized by category.

General editors

The editors covered in this section are usually the most common way of interfacing with objects in your 3D scene, as well as customizing Blender itself.

These editors give you general control over your scene or over Blender itself:

· 3D View (Shift+F5): Arguably the most-used editor in Blender, the 3D View shows you the three-dimensional view of your model or scene and provides access to many of the tools you can use to modify it.

· Properties (Shift+F7): You can manipulate nearly all of the different attributes for your scene and the objects within it via this editor. You can find out more about this topic later in this chapter in the section, "Understanding the Properties editor."

· Outliner (Shift+F9): The Outliner gives a hierarchical view of all the objects in your scene along with the ability to see how they’re related to one another. It's also a quick way to select objects and do simple manipulations in a complex scene.

· User Preferences: Through the User Preferences editor, you can customize how you interact with Blender.

· Info: The Info editor contains Blender's main menu and displays basic information about your scene. It also serves as a report space where warnings and errors are logged. This can be used to figure out what happened if a feature doesn't work as expected.

Animation editors

The following editors relate specifically to animation:

· Timeline: If you're working on an animation, the Timeline editor offers you a convenient way to quickly jump from one moment in your animation to another as well as play back the animation.

· Graph Editor (Shift+F6): Blender's Graph Editor shows a graphical representation of animatable attributes in your scene as they change over time.

· Dope Sheet (Shift+F12): The Dope Sheet is where you create and adjust your overall animation using actions or keying sets. You can use actions to animate all of a character's movement in a scene, or you can mix them together in the NLA Editor. Keying sets give you the ability to group together a bunch of different animatable attributes.

· NLA Editor: NLA stands for nonlinear animation. This editor allows you to mix pre-animated actions on a single character (such as mixing a waving hand animation with a walking animation to have your character walk and wave her hand at the same time).

2D editors

The following editors manipulate specific kinds of two-dimensional data:

· UV/Image Editor (Shift+F10): With the UV/Image Editor, you can do basic image editing as well as edit the texture coordinates for your models (see Chapter 7).

· Video Sequence Editor (Shift+F8): Blender's Video Sequence Editor (VSE) is a lightweight video editor. The VSE isn't as powerful as some other programs created specifically for editing video, but it's quite effective for stringing a sequence of scenes together and doing basic effects, overlays, and transitions.

· Movie Clip Editor: Currently, the Movie Clip Editor is the primary go-to editor for Blender's motion tracking features. Motion tracking is a process where the software analyzes moving parts of a video in an effort to relate them to 3D space. With video that's been successfully motion tracked, you can integrate 3D models into recorded video. Have you ever wondered how they get computer-generated monsters to look like they're in the same room as living actors? Motion tracking!

· Text Editor (Shift+F11): Blender's integrated Text Editor is not only handy for keeping notes about your scenes and models, but once you become a more advanced user, it's also a convenient place to write and test your own Python scripts and material shaders in Blender.

· Node Editor (Shift+F3): Blender has a Node Editor for materials and textures, as well as for compositing. This editor is where you modify these node structures. Cycles, a relatively new rendering engine that's integrated into Blender, makes heavy use of the node editor for its materials and lighting.

Chapters 7-9 cover Cycles extensively.

· Logic Editor (Shift+F2): Blender has a game engine integrated with it, allowing you to create your own custom video games directly within Blender. The Logic Editor is how you control and design the behavior in your game.

Utility editors

The following two editors aren't easily classified in any of the other categories, so they've found themselves at the end of the list. That doesn't make them any less useful, so it's still worth knowing what they are and what they do:

· File Browser: This editor allows you to look through the files on your computer. It also allows you to look at the innards of your Blender projects to see how things are structured or for linking to other projects.

· Python Console (Shift+F4): The Console is a pretty handy editor that's more often utilized by advanced users to help write custom Python scripts. It's a “live” console where you can use the Python language to directly issue commands to Blender.

Understanding the Properties editor

After the 3D View, the Properties editor is probably the second-most used editor type in Blender. You use buttons and values in this editor to modify the attributes of your scene and elements within it. Because this editor can manipulate so many parts of a scene, it's broken down and organized into a series of subsections.

You can access each of the various subsections by using the buttons in the header region of the Properties editor. It's worth noting here that these subsection buttons are ordered logically from large contexts (such as Scene properties) to progressively smaller contexts (such as Object Data properties) as you go from left to right. It's also good to know that the available subsections in the Properties editor can change depending on what your active selection is in the 3D View. For example, if you have a camera object selected, the Modifiers subsection of the Properties editor isn't visible (because modifiers can't be applied to cameras). The following list describes each subsection of the Properties editor:

· Render: The Render properties determine what the final output of your scene will look like when you decide to render it to an image or video. Chapters 14 and 15 cover these properties in more depth.

· Render Layers: You can organize the output of your scene in render layers, useful for compositing (see Chapter 15) different render outputs into a final image. The properties in this section give you control over organizing your render layers.

If you use the Freestyle edge renderer, this section also contains those properties.

· Scene: These general properties dictate the nature of your scene, including things like the active camera, units of measurement, and the strength of gravity if you're using simulated physics.

· World: The buttons and values in the World properties subsection control the environment that your scene is built in. They have a large influence on the final output of your scene.

· Object: Any object in your scene is going to have its own set of properties that you can modify. The Object properties subsection allows you to make changes that affect an object as it relates to the scene.

· Object Constraints: When working in 3D — particularly with animation — it's often useful to constrain the properties of one object to that of another. Constraints automate parts of your scene and help make it much more manageable. Chapter 10 goes into constraints more deeply.

· Modifiers: A lot of work goes into building 3D models, so it's to your benefit to take advantage of your computer and have it do as much work for you as possible. Let it take care of boring procedural steps like mirroring parts of your object or making it smoother while you focus on the more interesting steps in the process. Modifiers are great tools to facilitate these kinds of healthy shortcuts, and allow for more advanced uses in animation. This subsection is where you manage those modifiers. You can find out more about modifiers in Chapter 5.

· Object Data: Like the previous four subsections, buttons and values in Object Data properties change slightly depending on what sort of object you’ve selected, but their primary purpose is to give you the ability to work with the fundamental structural elements of your object.

“Object Data” is a generic term. Think of this section as properties based on what you've got selected. Even the icon for Object Data Properties changes depending on your selection. For example, if you have a camera object selected, these would be Camera Properties and the icon for this section looks like a camera. If you have a curve object selected, the icon looks like a curve and you'd think of this section as Curve Properties.

· Bone: The Bone properties subsection is only available if your active selection is an Armature object. Armatures, sometimes called skeletons in other programs, are used for animation in Blender and they consist of a set of bone sub-objects. Bone properties are where you can adjust attributes of a specific bone that you've selected in the armature.

· Bone Constraints: Similar to the Object Constraints properties, this subsection helps you manage constraints. The difference, however, is that this subsection is only available if your active selection is an Armature in Pose Mode and it's for managing constraints on bones, rather than objects. Chapters 10 and 11 cover constraints and the use of constraints on bones.

· Material: The controls in Material properties allow you to dramatically change the appearance of objects in your scene. Chapter 7 goes into this subsection in much more detail.

· Texture: Textures can have a profound effect on how the surface of your 3D objects appear, making smooth, clean objects look rough, gritty, and believable. You can also use textures as custom brushes when painting and sculpting in Blender. This subsection is where you can edit those textures. You can find out more on texturing in Chapter 8.

· Particles: In computer graphics, particle systems are often used to create special effects or manage the behavior of groups of objects. This subsection of the Properties editor is where you manage particle systems in Blender. Working with particles is a pretty advanced topic. Chapter 13 gives you a brief introduction to the possibilities that they have.

· Physics: In the spirit of making your computer do as much work for you as possible, having the computer simulate physical behavior in your objects is sometimes helpful. It lends realism to animations and can often help you work faster. The Physics properties subsection gives you controls for simulating physics on your objects. See Chapter 13 for more on these topics.

Customizing Blender to Fit You

You can tweak Blender's screen layout to virtually any configuration you can imagine. However, Blender's customization features go much deeper than just readjusting the areas in a Blender window. There are very few parts of Blender that, with a little time and effort, you can't completely overhaul to be as comfortable of a work environment as possible. This ability to customize is especially useful for people who are migrating to Blender from other 3D graphics programs. I won't say that you can make Blender behave exactly like any of these other programs, but sometimes little things like using the same keyboard shortcuts help make the transition smoother.

Although this section gives you the means to completely bend Blender's interface to your will, bear in mind that unless otherwise specified, this book relies on the default settings that ship with Blender. Unless you can remember your customized behaviors, it may be more helpful to use Blender's default settings (File⇒Load Factory Settings).

Using screen layout presets

You can make a variety of layouts depending on the sort of work you're doing. In Blender, these workspace layouts are called screens, and, by default, Blender comes with nine presets: 3D View Full, Animation, Compositing, Default, Game Logic, Motion Tracking, Scripting, UV Editing, and Video Editing. When you first load Blender, you’re in the Default screen layout. You can cycle through these screens by pressing Ctrl+← and Ctrl+→. If you prefer to use a menu, you can use the datablock (for more on datablocks, see the “Understanding datablocks” sidebar in this chapter) at the top of the window in the Info editor, as shown in Figure 2-2, and left-click the screen icon next to the name of the current screen layout.

Figure 2-2: The Screens menu.

You can rename any screen to any name by switching to that screen and left-clicking its name in the Screens datablock. Get used to the idea of naming everything in your projects. Trust me, being in the habit of using a reasonable name makes life infinitely easier. It's especially true when you come back to an old project and you need to figure out what everything is.

The screens, and therefore the order that they're cycled through when you press Ctrl+← or Ctrl+→, are arranged in alphabetical and numerical order, for fast and logical organization. If you want to cheat a bit, you can give a specific order to the list by putting a number in front of each screen's name (such as 1-Default, 2-Animation, and so on).

To create a new screen, left-click the plus icon next to the current screen name in the Info editor's header. Upon clicking this icon, Blender produces a duplicate of your existing screen layout. From here, you can make the changes to create your own custom layout, such as a materials editing layout or a multi-monitor layout with a separate window for each of your monitors.

You can also delete screens (including the default ones that ship with Blender, so be careful) by clicking the button with the X icon to the right of the Screen datablock. When you’re happy with changes you've made and you want to have these screens available (or not available, if you've removed screens) each time you start Blender, save your settings by going to File⇒Save Startup File or using the Ctrl+U hotkey.

If you make an area a Properties editor, Blender defaults to using the same vertical orientation for the editor that's used in the Default screen layout. However, in an area that's wider than it is tall, this can look stretched and weird. You can manually switch between a horizontal and vertical Properties editor by right-clicking a blank spot in the editor and choosing between a horizontal and vertical orientation.

Before creating a new screen that you want to keep around for future use, first return to your default setup by selecting File⇒New or pressing Ctrl+N. When you use the Save Startup File feature, Blender saves your current settings, layout, and even 3D scenes to a special .blend file called startup.blend that gets loaded each time it starts. So any models you have in the 3D View and any changes you make to other layouts are saved, too. Fortunately, if you've made a mistake, you can always return to the default setup by choosing File⇒Load Factory Settings and recreate your custom layouts from there.

This behavior of saving a special startup.blend file is fine for setting up custom screen layouts, but it can be pretty inconvenient if you're just making changes in User Preferences (such as custom hotkeys or themes). For those kinds of changes, it's better to use the Save User Settings button at the bottom of User Preferences (Ctrl+Alt+U). Using this button ensures that your new settings in User Preferences are loaded each time you start Blender, without overwriting your default scene or screen layouts.

Understanding datablocks: Fundamental elements in a Blender file

In Figure 2-2, look at the widget that's used to manage screens. The interface gives you access to something called a datablock. A simple and obvious definition of a datablock is that it's literally a block of data. However, a datablock has more to it. Datablocks are used throughout both Blender's interface and its internal structure, so understanding how they work and how you can take advantage of them goes a long way to understanding Blender itself. Nearly every critical element in Blender is stored in a type of datablock, from screens and scenes to objects and animations.

Not only is a datablock a handy way to store information, but it also allows Blender to treat this information like a database. In particular, you can link datablocks and let them share information. As an example, say that you've created an excellent wood material, and you want to have two objects — a table and a chair — look like they're both made of the same wood. Well, rather than recreate that exact same material for each object, you can simply link both object datablocks to the same material datablock. Your computer uses less memory, and, more importantly, you have less work to do. And because datablocks are used throughout Blender, this same concept works in all kinds of situations: sharing textures between materials, sharing particle systems between objects, and even sharing worlds between scenes. It's an incredibly powerful feature of Blender and I refer to datablocks a lot throughout this book.

When adjusting screen layouts, the menus and buttons in the header can be obscured or hidden if the area is too narrow. This scenario happens particularly often for people who work on computers with small monitors. In this case, you can do three things:

· Right-click in the header area and enable Header⇒Collapse Menus.

The menus are collapsed into a single button with an icon consisting of 3 lines. This frees up a little bit of space, but on smaller monitors, it may not be enough.

· Hover your mouse cursor over the header region and scroll your mouse wheel.

If any parts of the header are obscured, you can scroll them in and out of view.

· For a somewhat more direct method, Blender has another trick up its sleeve: Middle-click the header and drag your mouse left and right. The contents of the header move left and right so that you can bring those obscured buttons into view.

Setting user preferences

This section on user preferences is by no means comprehensive. The number of options available in Blender's User Preferences editor is mind-bogglingly large. My intent here is to introduce you to the most helpful and relevant options to get you working effectively. For specific details on every single button, see the online documentation available at www.blender.org/manual.

Of course, the first question is, “Where exactly are the buttons for user preferences?” Well, the User Preferences editor is just like any other editor in Blender and can therefore appear in any area you want it to by using the Editor Type menu in the header region of any editor. (For more information, see the section “Looking at Editor Types,” earlier in this chapter.) Of course, you can also go to File⇒User Preferences (Ctrl+Alt+U), and Blender creates a new window just for the User Preferences editor. Although creating a separate window is a bit of a violation of Blenders non-overlapping philosophy, it is sometimes nicer because you don't have to replace or split any of your existing areas to get a User Preferences editor.

If you choose File⇒User Preferences, and you don't see a new window with the User Preferences editor, your Blender window may be in a full-screen state and your operating system's window manager may not be allowing the window with User Preferences to sit atop that full-screen window. To get around this issue, toggle off the full-screen view by choosing Window⇒Toggle Fullscreen from the Info editor's header region or by pressing Alt+F11.

When you get the User Preferences to be the way you like, you can save them as your personal defaults by clicking the Save User Settings button at the bottom of the User Preferences editor.

Interface

The first set of available options in Blender's User Preferences (shown in Figure 2-3) relate to how you interact with your scene within the 3D View. Moving from left to right, here are some of the more useful options:

· Display: The options in this column toggle the display of various informational elements in the 3D View, such as tooltips, object information, and the small mini axis in the bottom left corner.

· View Manipulation: The options in this column give you control over how you interact with the environment in the 3D View.

· Auto Depth and Zoom To Mouse Position: If you tend to create large environment scenes, having these two options enabled is often useful so that you can quickly navigate your way through your scene without becoming stuck.

· Smooth View: Smooth View is probably one of the coolest convenience options added to Blender in recent history and as such, it deserves explicit mention here. By default, Smooth View is set to a value of 200. If you go to your 3D View and choose View⇒Camera (Numpad 0), the 3D View smoothly animates the change from the default perspective view to the Camera's perspective. Pretty slick, huh? The values in Smooth View are in milliseconds, with a maximum value of 1,000, or 1 second (although that's a bit slow for most tastes). The default value of 200 works nicely, but play with it on your own and see what works best for you.

· Manipulator: The 3D manipulator is the large colored axis at the center of the cube in Blender's default scene. Its main purpose is to move, rotate, or scale your selection in the 3D View. Chapter 3 goes into more detail on how to use the manipulator. The settings here control whether or not the manipulator is enabled by default, as well as its size when visible.

· Menus: Some users prefer to have menus immediately pop open when they run their mouse cursor over them. The options under this heading facilitate that preference. It's disabled by default, but you can enable the Open On Mouse Over check box and then use the values below that to adjust the delay, or how long your mouse has to be over a menu's name before it pops up.

· Pie Menus: Pie menus are an optional menu type in Blender that I cover at the end of Chapter 1. The settings here offer a little control over how the pie menus appear, and for how long.

Figure 2-3: The Interface options in User Preferences.

Editing

The next set of options is related to the act of editing objects. As shown in Figure 2-4, the most relevant options are as follows:

· Undo: The options related to undo are pretty important. Here you can adjust how many steps of undo you have when working in Blender (default is 32), as well as toggle Global Undo on and off. Now, you may be wondering why in the world anyone would ever want to disable the ability to undo a mistake. The most common answer to this question is performance. Having undo enabled requires more memory from your computer, and each level of undo requires a little bit more. Sometimes, when working with very complex scenes or models, an artist might disable undo to dedicate all the computer's memory to the current scene rather than the steps used to create it. This decision occurs most when artists work with Blender's sculpting tools (see Chapter 5).

· Playback: When animating, there are times when you need to start animating before the first frame, such as starting the scene with a character, object, or simulation already in motion. By default, however, Blender doesn't allow you to work in the Timeline (or any other editor) on frame numbers less than zero. But if you enable the Allow Negative Frames check box, that limitation is removed.

· Transform: If you're migrating to Blender from another 3D suite, or if your primary pointing device is a pressure-sensitive drawing tablet, you may find it difficult to use Blender's “click to confirm” default behavior when grabbing, scaling, or rotating your selections. If you enable the Release Confirms check box, you may feel more comfortable.

Figure 2-4: The Editing options in User Preferences.

Input

The settings and controls in the Input options of the User Preferences editor have the greatest influence over how you interact with Blender. As Figure 2-5 shows, this section is extensive.

Figure 2-5: The Input options in User Preferences.

The largest part of this section — the event editor on the right side — is actually covered later in this chapter in the section “Using custom event maps.” However, the left-side column has quite a few useful settings as well:

· Presets: Blender ships with a small assortment of application interaction presets — a fancy way of saying hotkey and mouse configurations. In addition to the default preset, Blender also ships with a few presets that match the interaction styles of other popular 3D programs. You can use this datablock-like menu to choose an existing preset, create a new one, or delete a preset you never want to use.

· Emulate 3 Button Mouse: Blender was designed to be used with a three-button mouse. However, not all computers have three-button mice, and some artists prefer to work with drawing tablets that don't have an easily accessible middle mouse button. Enabling this option helps these users compensate by using Alt+left-click to do what is normally done with the middle-click.

· Continuous Grab: Continuous Grab is a cool feature that allows you to continue moving an object even after your mouse cursor has reached the edge of the editor. Continuous Grab is very useful and enabled by default, but it doesn't work as nicely for users working with a tablet interface, so you can disable it here if you need to.

· Select With: Blender's default behavior is to select objects with the right mouse button. However people migrating to Blender from other programs may be more comfortable selecting with the left mouse button. This control lets you switch between the two. I cover this setting later in this chapter in the section “Selecting objects.” A word of warning: Setting this value to Left disables the Emulate 3 Button Mouse feature.

· Emulate Numpad: This setting is a very handy option for laptop users. As you see in the next section, Blender makes use of the numeric keypad for quick access to top, front, side, and camera views in the 3D View. Unfortunately, most laptop users don’t have an easily accessible numeric keypad on their keyboards. As a workaround, the Emulate Numpad option uses the number keys at the top of the keyboard to have the functionality that the corresponding numpad numbers have. This control in User Preferences disables the normal layer-switching functionality that the number keys at the top of the keyboard normally perform, but the ability to quickly change views tends to be more valuable to users than the ability to quickly change layers.

· Orbit Style: By default, Blender uses the Turntable setting. However, some users have difficulty navigating to a particular part of their scenes or models when using Turntable setting. For them, the Trackball setting may be more comfortable.

The difference between the two settings may seem subtle to a new user, but if you're used to one orbit style, it can be very disorienting to try working in the other.

· Invert Zoom Direction: Similar to the Orbit Style option, some people are more comfortable scrolling forward to zoom out and back to zoom in. This setting gives users that option.

Add-ons

Blender ships with an assortment of extensions, called add-ons, which provide users with additional capabilities within Blender. For example, if you're a veteran Blenderhead and you're used to the old Spacebar menu from much earlier versions of Blender, there's an add-on that puts that feature back. Other add-ons modify Blender's interface, add new primitive objects, or provide additional tools that can help speed up your work. Another key feature of add-ons is that they are tightly integrated into Blender's interface. Once an add-on is enabled, its functionality looks and works just like native features in Blender, like it was there all along!

You can manage all add-ons from the Add-ons section of User Preferences, as shown in Figure 2-6.

Figure 2-6: The Add-ons options in User Preferences.

There are three types, or support levels, for add-ons:

· Official: These add-ons officially ship with Blender on release. Core development team supports them and ensures that they continue to work with each Blender release.

Although these add-ons come with Blender, they aren't all enabled by default, because some of them favor very specific workflows.

· Community: These add-ons also officially ship with Blender on release. However, rather than being supported by the core developers, the add-ons at this support level are maintained by community developers (usually the people who first wrote them). None of these add-ons are enabled by default, but many of them are very useful.

I'm not just saying that because I wrote one of them. I promise!

· Testing: There are two kinds of add-ons at this support level:

· Very new add-ons that haven't been thoroughly tested by users.

· Veteran add-ons that aren't actively maintained and supported by any developer.

The Testing add-ons don't ship with Blender's official release, but you can download them individually from the Blender Add-ons Catalog (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts).

You can use the buttons on the left side of the Add-ons section in User Preferences to filter the add-ons you see according to support level. By default, all community supported add-ons that ship with Blender are disabled. Most of the officially supported add-ons are for importing and exporting file types to and from other programs. The bulk of these are enabled by default. To enable or disable a specific add-on, use the following steps:

1. Find the add-on that you're interested in enabling.

2. Left-click the check box on the right side of the add-on's box.

Left-clicking the triangle on the left of the box expands it so that you can get more details about a specific add-on.

That's it! The add-on is enabled. Depending on what the add-on does, you should be able to find it in the interface and use it immediately.

All of Blender's add-ons are broken down into specific categories, and you can use the buttons on the left to see just the add-ons that are specific to a single category. Alternatively, you can use the search field above the category buttons.

Themes

Blender has quite a bit of flexibility in adjusting how it looks, thanks to the Themes options, shown in Figure 2-7. I took almost all the screenshots for this book using a variation of the Default theme that I created, lightened for readability in black-and-white print. However, when I work in Blender, I use my own theme that's a bit darker and easier on the eyes. Darker themes are particularly helpful if, like me, you're known for sitting behind the computer and working in Blender for 10- to 15-hour stretches (or more). In those situations, the less stress you can put on your eyes, the better.

I include a copy of the theme I use in this book on my website for this book, www.blenderbasics.com. Feel free to use this theme for your Blender sessions or make your own! Everyone has their own tastes. In fact, one of the more popular Blender users, Pablo Vazquez (known as VenomGFX), used to have a theme that's completely purple and pink! He's since moved to something a bit more tame, but pink still is used in it. You can see it by trying out the theme named Amaranth.

Figure 2-7: The Themes options in User Preferences.

File

The File options relate to how Blender works with files. Figure 2-8 shows the settings in this section of the User Preferences editor.

Figure 2-8: The File options in User Preferences.

The following list describes the important parts of this section:

· File Paths: Like most programs, Blender works with files. The values in this column show the default locations where Blender either places files or looks for them. Here you can indicate where your fonts are located, where you want to save your renders by default, and where to look for textures and sounds.

Probably the most important path in this section is the one for Temp. This location is where Blender stores auto save files, and it’s also where it stores the notorious quit.blend file, which is great for recovering your last blender session. The default location for temporary files is /tmp/ on Linux and Mac OS X. On Windows, it's your user's temporary folder in C:\Users\<Your Username>\AppData\Local\Temp\.

Linux users may want to change this location because some Linux distributions like Ubuntu automatically clear the /tmp directory on each boot. I can't tell you the number of people who have closed Blender without saving their work and later realized that they couldn't recover any of their work because this path wasn't properly set.

· Auto Execution: As a security feature, the Auto Run Python Scripts check box is disabled. This provides a bit of a safeguard in the event that you download a .blend file from the internet and run it in Blender, preventing potentially dangerous scripts from running right when you open the file. At the same time, this feature can prove to be quite frustrating if you don't download a lot of .blend files from untrusted sources and you have animation rigs that rely on Python to work. If that's the case and you trust every .blend file that you open, you can enable this check box.

· Save and Load: These options relate to how Blender opens and saves project files. Of these options, the two most worth knowing about are Compress File and Load UI, both of which you can modify from the File Browser, but these check boxes define the default behavior.

· Compress File: This option is handy because it makes your .blend project files smaller when you save.

· Load UI: Load UI is short for Load User Interface, meaning that when you open a .blend file, Blender will adjust your screen layout to match the one that was used to create that file.

· Auto Save: Before Blender had undo functionality, users relied heavily on its auto save features. Even in the age of undo, these options are a life saver. For that reason, the following list goes into these settings in more detail:

· Save Versions: Each time you manually save a file in Blender, it takes your last save and stores it as an earlier version. You may have already created work in Blender and noticed some .blend1 and .blend2 files in the same place you saved your .blend files. Those .blend1 and .blend2 files are the earlier versions. This option allows you to determine how many of these earlier versions you'd like Blender to retain for you. Each version has a number appended to the end of it, so if you have MyFile.blend and you have Save Versions set at 2, then after a few saves, you should see MyFile.blend, MyFile.blend1, and MyFile.blend2 all in the same folder.

· Recent Files: The number in this field tells Blender how many of your past files to remember when you go to File⇒Open Recent or press Shift+Ctrl+O. You can also use the File Browser (F1 or Ctrl+O) and look on the sidebar under the Recent heading.

· Save Preview Images: When this option is enabled, each time you save, Blender embeds a small preview image of your current screen layout, as well as each texture and material in your project, into your .blend file. This way, you can use Blender's Image Browser to see materials and textures when you append or link from other files. Also, with this enabled, .blend files will show these previews in your operating system's file manager.

· Auto Save Temporary Files: Enabled by default, this option is Blender's auto save functionality. It saves a copy of the current state of your file, or what I call a “hot backup”, in your Temp directory (adjustable in the File Paths options) every few minutes, as dictated by the Timer field below this button.

Some file paths begin with two forward slashes (//). These slashes are Blender's notation for a relative path, or file path as it relates to the location on your hard drive of your current file. In contrast is an absolute path, which is the full path to your file from the root of your file system. For example, if you have a file saved as /home/user/Documents/project.blend, then the absolute path to project.blend is /home/user/Documents/. Now say that you have a folder named textures in the same folder as your project.blend file, and in that folder is an image named sandpaper.png. The absolute path to that image is /home/user/Documents/textures/, while its relative path (relative to project.blend) is //textures.

System

Whereas the Interface options dictate how you interact with Blender, the options in the System section, shown in Figure 2-9, tend to dictate more how Blender interacts with you. Many options here are geared toward optimizing for performance, and generally the defaults work well.

Figure 2-9: The System options in User Preferences.

Some of the more interesting options follow:

· Compute Device: If you're using Cycles as your renderer, the settings here are pretty important. If your computer has a sufficiently powerful graphics processing unit (GPU) — usually this is your computer's video card — Cycles can take advantage of that additional processing power, dramatically reducing the amount of time required for rendering. Depending on your GPU type, you'll want to set this to either

· CUDA (for NVIDIA GPUs)

· OpenCL (for AMD/ATI GPUs)

You can then choose the specific GPU from the drop-down menu.

If you don't have the kind of GPU that Cycles can take advantage of, there's no need to worry. The Compute Device defaults to None and Cycles will just use your CPU. You can read more about Cycles in Chapter 14.

As of this writing, the OpenCL option for Compute Device doesn't work particularly well on AMD GPUs. There's hope that it may be fixed and working in the future, but that depends on AMD changing their drivers. In the meantime, if you have an AMD video card, you're probably best keeping the Compute Device option set to None.

· OpenGL: If Blender is working sluggishly or if the interface looks really odd (noise, strange tears, repeating patterns), these settings are the first place to look to see whether you can get Blender working nicely. In particular, you may want to try enabling vertex buffer objects (VBOs). With VBOs enabled, Blender's interface should be snappier on more modern video cards. However, on older hardware, VBOs may cause Blender's screen to behave strangely.

· Window Draw Method: This drop-down menu is another fine place to look if Blender is displaying bizarrely on you. The default setting of Automatic should give you the best performance on your computer. However, if you're on an older machine, try seeing whether the Overlap or Full methods work better.

· Region Overlap: If you enable this check box and you have a sufficiently modern video card, the regions in the 3D View (the Properties region and the Tool Shelf) will be semi-transparent, allowing your 3D scene to show through them. Not only is this attractive, but it helps keep as much of your 3D scene visible as possible.

· Solid OpenGL Lights: With these settings, you can adjust the standard lighting used in your 3D View. Some Blender users set these colors to drastically different settings so that they can have a good sense of each side of their model and more easily see some of the contours. You have the ability to enable up to three lights. On each one, you can adjust the direction of the light by adjusting the X, Y, and Z direction values. You can adjust either of the two colors for the light (main color and highlight or specularity color, respectively) by left-clicking them and using the color picker that pops up.

· Color Picker Type: Speaking of color pickers, Blender gives you the option of a variety of ways to choose colors while working. The default is a circular hue, saturation, value (HSV) color picker. It's generally faster to use for choosing colors when painting. However, everyone has different tastes in what color pickers they prefer to use, and some color pickers are better than others for specific purposes. For that reason, a drop-down menu contains a selection of different color pickers that you can use in Blender. Play with the color pickers on the Solid OpenGL Lights and see which one suits you the best.

Using custom event maps

A primary inspiration for the deep structural changes introduced in Blender's code for the 2.5 series was to refactor Blender's event system. An event system is required for a complex program to interact with you and me, the users. Each time you press a button or move your mouse, it registers with the program as an event. The program then handles the event by performing an action of some sort. As an example, moving your mouse registers as an event, which then triggers your computer to perform the action of updating the location of the mouse cursor on your monitor.

Blender provides you the ability to customize the event system to suit your needs, mapping events to a wide variety of possible Blender operations. Don't like using a particular hotkey in Blender's default configuration? You're free to change it. And that's just the start!

If you refer to Figure 2-5, you should notice that the entire right side of the editor is devoted to modifying how events are handled within Blender. This list of events is particularly daunting to look at, and you can easily get lost among all of those expanding and collapsing categories of events. Fortunately, you can modify how events are handled in a much easier way, and you don't even have use the User Preferences editor if you don't want to. Instead, you can use the following steps:

1. Find the operation you want to bind in Blender's menu system.

Say that you want to change the hotkey for opening a new project from Ctrl+N (the current hotkey) to Ctrl+X, the hotkey used in previous versions of Blender. You can find this operation by going to the Info editor's header and choosing File⇒New. Go to that menu item, but don't click it yet. Just hover your mouse cursor over it and proceed to the next step.

2. Right-click the menu item for the operation you want to add or change hotkeys and choose Change Shortcut from the menu that appears.

In this example, go to File⇒New, right-click it, and choose Change Shortcut. Blender prompts you for a new hotkey.

3. When prompted, use the new hotkey that you want to assign to the operation.

In this case, you press Ctrl+X.

Congratulations! Your new hotkey is assigned!

Figure 2-10 shows this process in action.

Figure 2-10: Customizing a hotkey sequence directly from Blender's menus.

As of this writing, Blender doesn’t warn you if you attempt to assign a hotkey that has already been bound to another operation. Blender simply double-binds the hotkey, favoring default behaviors over custom ones. Blender's interface will still say your custom hotkey is assigned to the desired action, but it just won't work as expected. Currently, the only way to get around this problem is to make sure that your desired hotkey isn't already assigned.

Of course, for ultimate control, the Input section of User Preferences is really the way to go. As daunting as this section may appear, it's actually pretty easy to use. The most effective way to make use of the event editor is to use the search feature, a text field with a magnifying glass icon in the upper right corner of the Input section:

1. In the search filter field, type all or part of the operation you want to customize and press Enter.

The listing below updates with Blender's best guesses for the operation you're looking for. Alternatively, you can just drill down through the categories until you find the event you want.

If you don't know the name of the operator, you can search by the hotkey it uses. Left-click the drop-down menu to the left of the search filter field. You can choose between Name (the default) to search by operator name or Key-Binding to search by hotkey.

2. Modify the event you want to change.

Changing an actual event is much like the process used to add hotkeys to menu items. It works like so:

1. Use the Type of Event Mapping drop-down menu displayed to the right or the operation name to stipulate whether the event is coming from a keyboard, mouse, text input, or some other source. For example, if you're adjusting a hotkey, make sure that you've set it to Keyboard.

2. Left-click the Type of Event field that comes after the Type of Event Mapping menu. It will either be blank or already have an event in it. Upon doing so, Blender prompts you for your new custom event (hotkey, mouse click, and so on).

3. Set the event with the action you want assigned to it. For example, if you're changing a hotkey, simply enter the key combination you want to use. If you decide that you don't want to change the event, just click anywhere outside of the Event Type field.

While you're editing your events, you might notice that a Restore button appears under the search filter field. At any time, if you decide that you want to revert to the system defaults, click the Restore button. Everything goes back to the way it initially was.

You can also use this interface to activate and deactivate events, delete events, and restore them to their initial values. Furthermore, if you expand the event's details by left-clicking the triangle to the left of the operation name, you have even more advanced controls. Figure 2-11 shows an expanded event.

Figure 2-11: Blender gives you a lot of custom control over its event system.

Customizing the event system can be a pretty involved topic, so if you're really interested in making extensive changes, it's to your benefit to play with the event system editor in the Input section of User Preferences a lot and make heavy use of the Restore buttons so that you can get Blender back to its defaults if something messes up.

After you have your events customized, you can save them to an external file that you can share with other users or simply carry with you on a USB drive so that your customized version of Blender is available wherever you go. To do so, click the Export Key Configuration button at the bottom of the User Preferences editor. A File Browser opens, and you can pick where you want to save your configuration file. The configuration is saved as a Python script. To load your custom configuration, it's possible to load your script in Blender and just run it. However, simply using the Import Key Configuration button at the bottom of the User Preferences editor is much easier.

Navigating in Three Dimensions

The 3D View is probably the most used window type in all of Blender. It also has some of the most unique interface decisions of any 3D software program. The purpose of this section is to guide you to understanding how to wield this part of Blender like a virtual 3D ninja!

All right, so perhaps I am a little over the top with the whole ninja thing, but hopefully this section takes you at least one or two steps closer to that goal.

Orbiting, panning, and zooming the 3D View

When trying to navigate a three-dimensional space through a two-dimensional screen like a computer monitor, you can't interact with that virtual 3D space exactly like you would in the real world, or as I like to call it, meatspace. The best way to visualize working in 3D through a program like Blender is to imagine the 3D View as your eyes to this 3D world. But rather than think of yourself as moving through this environment, imagine that you have the ability to move this entire world around in front of you.

The most basic way of navigating this space is called orbiting. Orbiting is the rough equivalent of rotating the 3D world around a fixed point in space. In order to orbit in Blender, middle-click anywhere in the 3D View and drag your mouse cursor around.

Occasionally, you have the need to keep your orientation to the world, but you'll want to move it around so that you can see a different part of the scene from the same angle. In Blender, this movement is called panning, and you do it by holding Shift while middle-clicking and dragging your mouse cursor in the 3D View. Now when you drag your mouse cursor around, the world shifts around without changing the angle that you're viewing from.

The third way of navigating 3D space is when you want get closer to an object in your scene. Similar to working with a camera, this movement is called zooming the view. In Blender, you can zoom in two ways. The easiest method is by using your mouse's scroll wheel. By default, scrolling forward zooms in and scrolling back zooms out. However, this method doesn't always give you fine-grained control, and, even worse, some people don't have a mouse with a scroll wheel. In these cases, you can zoom by holding Ctrl while middle-clicking in the 3D View. Now, when you drag your mouse cursor up, you zoom in, and when you drag your mouse cursor down, you zoom out. If you prefer to move your mouse horizontally instead of vertically for zooming, you can adjust this behavior in the Input section of User Preferences.

Of course, if you happen to be working with a mouse that doesn’t have a middle mouse button or you work with a pen and tablet interface, you should go to User Preferences under Input and enable the Emulate 3 Button Mouse check box. With this check box enabled, you can emulate the middle mouse button by pressing Alt+left-click. So orbiting is Alt+left-click, panning is Shift+Alt+left-click, and zooming is done with Ctrl+Alt+left-click. Table 2-1 has a more organized way of showing these hotkeys.

Table 2-1 Keyboard/Mouse Keys for Navigating 3D Space

Changing views

Although using the mouse to work your way around the 3D space is the most common way to adjust how you view things, Blender has some menu items and hotkey sequences that help give you specific views much faster and more accurately than you can do alone with your mouse.

The View menu

On occasion, you want to know what a model looks like when it's viewed directly from the front, side, or top. Blender has some convenient shortcuts for quickly switching to these views. The most obvious way is to use the View menu in the 3D View's header, as shown on the left of Figure 2-12. This menu lets you choose a variety of angles, including the top, front, right, and the view from any of the cameras you may have in your scene.

You can also use this menu to switch between orthographic and perspective views. The orthographic view of a 3D scene is similar to how technical drawings and blueprints are done. If two objects are the same size, they always appear to be the same size, regardless of how far away from you they are. This view is ideal for getting sizes and proportions correct in your models, especially if they’re based on blueprints or technical drawings. The perspective view is more akin to how you actually see things. That is, objects in the distance look smaller than objects that are near you.

If you have the Pie Menus add-on enabled, as described at the end of Chapter 1, there's an even faster menu for changing views. With your mouse cursor hovered over the 3D View, press Q. When you press this hotkey, a pie menu appears under your mouse cursor. The options in this pie menu are conveniently arranged for changing views. Move your mouse cursor up to change to top view, down for bottom view, left and right for their respective views, and so on. It's really incredibly fast. It feels almost like you're flinging the 3D View around in front of you. On the right side of Figure 2-12 is the pie version of the View menu.

Figure 2-12: The View menu in the 3D View (left) and the pie menu version of the View menu (right).

Behold the power of the numeric keypad!

The View menu is certainly helpful, even in its pie form, but you can change your view in an even faster way: the numeric keypad. Each button on your keyboard's numeric keypad has an extremely fast way of changing your viewing angle in the 3D View. Figure 2-13 is an image of the numeric keypad with an indication of what each key does.

Figure 2-13: The numeric keypad is your ultimate tool for navigating 3D space.

If the image in Figure 2-13 doesn't quite work for you as a reference, Table 2-2 shows what each key does in a table-based format.

Table 2-2 Hotkeys on the Numeric Keypad

In Figure 2-13, notice that the hotkeys are arranged in a way that corresponds with how you would expect them to be. Top view is at the top of the keypad at Numpad 7. The front view is accessed at Numpad 1, and if you move to the right on the keypad, you can see the right side view by pressing Numpad 3. Because it's the view you render from, the active camera is the most important and therefore gets the largest key at Numpad 0. Pressing Numpad 5 is a quick way to toggle between orthographic and perspective views. If you have View Name turned on in the Interface section of User Preferences, it actively informs you about which view you’re using. And having the very cool Smooth View option enabled definitely helps you keep from getting disoriented while working.

The notions of what is left and right in the 3D View are relative to you, not the object or scene you're working in. That is, if you model a character who's facing you from the front view, pressing Numpad 3 (right side view) shows your character's left side. This setup can be a bit confusing in writing or conversation, but while you're working, it's really not much of an issue. I actually tend to think of the right and left side views as side view and other side view to avoid confusing myself.

Here is where the numeric keypad shows its real power. With the numeric keypad, you can just as easily view the opposite angle (bottom, back, or other side views) as you can the standard views. To see the opposite side of the standard views, press Ctrl while hitting the corresponding Numpad key. For example, if you want to see the bottom view, press Ctrl+Numpad 7.

Now, maybe you got a little bit excited and hit Ctrl+Numpad 0 to see what the opposite of the camera view is and had some unexpected results. Ctrl+Numpad 0 does something entirely different than pressing Ctrl in combination the other Numpad numbers. The Ctrl+Numpad 0 hotkey actually allows you to treat any selectable object in Blender as a camera, with the view looking down the object's local Z-axis. You can also access this functionality from the View menu at View⇒Cameras⇒Set Active Object as Camera. If you’re confused, take a quick look at the beginning of Chapter 3 for more explanation on local and global coordinate systems. The ability to treat any object as a camera may seem like a strange feature to have, but it can be really helpful for doing things like aiming lights and checking the line of sight of an object or a character.

Another cool thing you can do with Numpad 0 is to quickly snap the camera to your user view. For example, say that you've been working on 3D model for a while from a certain angle, and you want to see what the model looks like in a render from that specific angle. Rather than try to grab and rotate your camera to get close to this same angle, you can simply press Ctrl+Alt+Numpad 0 or choose View⇒Align View⇒Align Active Camera to View, and the camera jumps directly to where you’re viewing your model. I find myself using this hotkey sequence quite a bit when I'm creating my models. Sometimes it's just easier to change your user view and snap your camera to it than it is to aim the camera how you want it.

The numeric keypad also gives you the ability to navigate your scene like you might normally do with your mouse. You use the 8, 4, 6, and 2 keys on the numeric keypad. Numpad 8 and Numpad 2 orbit the view towards and away, respectively, whereas Numpad 4 and Numpad 6 orbit it left and right. By default, Blender does these rotations in 15-degree increments, but you adjust this amount to be more fine or coarse in User Preferences under Interface with the value labeled Rotation Angle. Orbiting with the Numpad is a nice way to get a quick turntable view of a scene, particularly if you have your View rotation set to Trackball in User Preferences. You can also pan the view by pressing Ctrl in combination with any of these buttons. For example, Ctrl+Numpad 4 and Ctrl+Numpad 6 pan the view left and right. You can even zoom the view by using the Numpad Plus (+) and Numpad Minus (-) keys.

Two more useful hotkeys are on the numeric keypad: Numpad Slash (/) and Numpad Dot (.). These keys are somewhat more esoteric than the other keys, but they definitely come in handy.

Of the two, I tend to use Numpad Slash the most. Pressing Numpad Slash (/) toggles what Blender calls Local View. Basically, Local View hides everything in your scene except for the object or objects you’ve selected. Local View is really helpful for temporarily isolating a single object or set of objects in a complex scene so that you can work on it without anything else getting in your way.

The Numpad Dot (.) hotkey also comes in handy when you want to focus on a specific part of your scene. Pressing Numpad Dot (.) centers the objects you've selected in the 3D View. Centering is particularly useful if you've rotated or panned everything out of sight, and you want to bring your selected objects back into view.

One other key worth mentioning, although it's not exactly on the numeric keypad, is the Home key. Whereas using Numpad Dot (.) brings your selected objects into view, pressing Home zooms your view back until all objects in your scene are visible in the 3D View. Home is a very convenient key for getting an overall idea of what's going on in your scene.

Ways to see your 3D scene

Aside from changing the angle from which you view your 3D world, you may also want to change how the world is shown in the 3D View. In particular, I'm referring to what is called the viewport shading. By default, Blender starts in the Solid shading type, which shows your models as solid 3D objects, lit by the OpenGL lights you can set in Blender's User Preferences under System. You can change the viewport shading by going to the 3D View's header and left-clicking the button with a white circular icon, as seen in on the left of Figure 2-14.

If you have the Pie Menus add-on enabled, you can also change viewport shading type by pressing Z. The options here are the same as the shading types described in the previous paragraph. The only difference is that they're faster to access by using the pie layout. Figure 2-14 has the pie menu of viewport shading types on the right side.

Figure 2-14: Viewport shading types from the 3D View's header (left) and from a pie menu (right).

Clicking this button reveals the following possible viewport shading types:

· Rendered: As you might expect, this renders your scene in the 3D View from whatever arbitrary perspective you want. Depending on the complexity of your scene, this is a great way to get a very accurate preview of your final rendered images.

Fair warning: the Rendered viewport shading type can be extremely slow when using the Blender Internal renderer. It's much more responsive when using Cycles, even more so if you have a powerful GPU. You can toggle this view quickly using Shift+Z.

· Material: This viewport shading type is only really useful if you're using the Cycles renderer. It gives you a general impression of what the lighting and texturing of your scene will look like when you render it.

· Textured: The Textured viewport shading type attempts to faithfully show you what your object will look like when textured and lit for the final render. The preview may differ a bit from what the final looks like, but short of rendering, it should give you the best idea to work from. Pressing Alt+Z quickly toggles between this viewport shading type and the Solid one. Note, however, that this viewport shading type works best if you're using the Blender Internal rendering engine. In Cycles, Textured viewport shading shows the currently selected image texture node. See Chapter 8 for more on texturing in Blender.

If you have a modern accelerated video card, you can enable GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language) shaders from the Properties region (View⇒Properties or the N hotkey) under Display⇒Shading. Change this drop-down menu from Multitexture to GLSL; when you use image-based textures, the Textured viewport shading type will be more accurate. More on this topic is in Chapter 8.

· Solid: Solid is the default viewport shading type that Blender starts with. Press Z to toggle between Solid and Wireframe. For performance reasons, Solid is usually the standard work mode for working in Blender. If you have an older video card, the Textured viewport shading types will perform much slower than this one.

· Wireframe: This viewport shading type shows the objects in your scene as transparent line-drawings. The wireframe viewport shading type is a good quick way to get an idea of the structure of your models. And because Wireframe is a bunch of lines, Blender doesn't have to worry about shading and therefore doesn't tax your computer's processor as much. On older computers, Blender is a lot more responsive using Wireframe than Solid or Textured.

· Bounding Box: The Bounding Box draw type replaces your 3D object with a wireframe cube that shows how much space your object takes up in the 3D world. This type isn’t as commonly used as the others, but it does come in handy for quickly placing objects in a scene or detecting when two objects might collide. It can also be handy for scenes that feature a lot of complex geometry.

You may also notice that if you have more than one 3D View window, they don't all have to have the same viewport shading type. You can see the wireframe of your model in one editor while adjusting the lighting using the Shaded draw type in another.

Selecting objects

How you select objects is one of the most controversial design decisions in Blender's interface: In nearly every other program, you select things — be they text, 3D objects, files, or whatever — by left-clicking them. This is not the case in Blender. When you left-click in the 3D View, all it seems to do is move around some strange crosshair thing. That “thing” is Blender's 3D cursor. I talk more about the 3D cursor later, but in the meantime, you're probably thinking, “How in the world do I select anything?”

The answer is simple: You select objects in Blender by right-clicking them. Multiple objects are selected and deselected by Shift+right-clicking them.

Although right-clicking to select certainly seems strange, there is actually a reason for doing it this way. This design decision wasn’t made at random or just to be different for the sake of being different. There are actually two reasons for doing it this way. One is philosophical, and the other is practical.

· Separating selection from action: In Blender, the left mouse button is intended to be used to perform or confirm an action. You left-click buttons or menus and left-click to confirm the completion of an operation like moving, rotating, or scaling an object, and you use it to place the 3D cursor. Selecting an object doesn't really act upon it or change it. So right-click is used to select objects as well as cancel an operation before it's completed. This setup is a bit abstract, but as you work this way, it does actually begin to make sense. A functional example would be interacting with the 3D manipulator (as covered in Chapter 3). If action and selection are on the same mouse button, it becomes too easy to accidentally move an object using the 3D manipulator when you only meant to select, and vice versa.

· Prevention of Repetitive Stress Injury (RSI): Computer graphics artists like 3D modelers and animators are known for working at a computer for insanely long stretches of time. Repetitive stress injury, or RSI, is a real concern. The more you can spread the work across the hand, the lower the chance of RSI. By making it so that you're not doing every single operation with the left mouse button, Blender helps in this regard.

Bottom line, the right-click-to-select paradigm really is a nice, efficient way of working in 3D space after you get used to it. However, if you try it and still don't like it, Blender offers you the ability to swap left and right mouse button usage in the Input section of User Preferences. Do note, however, that this book is written with the default right-click behavior in mind, so remember that as you read other chapters.

Taking advantage of the 3D cursor

“Okay,” you say, “I can handle the right-click-to-select thing. But what's with these crosshairs that move to where ever I left-click? It seems pretty useless.”

Those crosshairs are the 3D cursor. It's a unique concept that I've only seen in Blender, and this design is anything but useless. The best way to understand the 3D cursor is to think about a word processor or text editor. When you add text or want to change something in one of those programs, it's usually done with or relative to the blinking cursor on the screen. Blender's 3D cursor serves pretty much the same purpose, but in three dimensions. When you add a new object, it's placed wherever the 3D cursor is located. When you rotate or scale an object, you can do it relative to the 3D cursor's location. And when you want to snap an object to a specific location, you do it with the 3D cursor.

In terms of adjusting your 3D View, you can use the 3D cursor as a quick way to recenter your view. Simply place the 3D cursor anywhere in the 3D View by left-clicking. Now press Alt+Home and watch as the 3D View adjusts to put the cursor at the center of the window. This is similar to pressing Numpad Dot (.), except that you don't have to select any objects. Another convenient hotkey sequence is Shift+C. This combination relocates the 3D cursor to the origin coordinates of the 3D environment and then brings all objects into view. The Shift+C hotkey combination is like pressing Home with the added benefit of moving the cursor to the origin.

In Chapter 3, I cover the topic of grabbing, scaling, and rotating objects. Usually, you want to use Blender's default behavior of doing these operations relative to the median point of the selected objects. However, you can also perform any of these operations relative to the 3D cursor by pressing the Period (.) key on your keyboard or selecting 3D Cursor from the Pivot menu in the 3D View's header, as shown in on the left of Figure 2-15. You can use this menu to switch back to the default behavior or press Comma (,).

If you have the Pie Menus add-on enabled, pressing Period (.) does not automatically toggle. Instead, pressing that hotkey brings up a pie menu version of the Pivot menu, as shown on the right of Figure 2-15.

Figure 2-15: The Pivot menu in the 3D View's header (left) and as a pie menu (right).

The 3D cursor is also very useful for snapping, or moving a selection to a specific point in space. For a better idea of what snapping means, hover your mouse over the 3D View and press Shift+S. A menu like the one in Figure 2-16 appears.

Figure 2-16: The Snap menu.

Through this menu, you can snap your selected object to a fixed coordinate on the grid in the 3D View, the location of the 3D cursor, or to the center of the grid, also known as the origin of the scene. You also have the ability to snap the 3D cursor to the middle of multiple selected objects, a fixed location on the grid, or to the active object in the scene. This method is a very effective way to move an object to a specific point in 3D space, and it's all thanks to the little 3D cursor.

Extra Features in the 3D View

A handful of additional features in Blender's 3D View are worth mentioning before closing this chapter. They can be classified as productivity enhancers, learning aids, or comfort features for users migrating from other programs. This section outlines a few of these features.

Quad View

If you've used other 3D graphics programs, you may be used to something referred to as Quad View, where the 3D View is split into four regions: top, front, and right orthographic views, along with a user perspective view. You can create a layout similar to this through the somewhat arduous task of manually splitting areas and then setting up each area as a 3D View from each of those perspectives. However, with no way to lock those views in place, you could very easily change one of your orthographic views to user perspective on accident. Fortunately, there's a better way. Go to the 3D View's header and click View⇒Toggle Quad View or use the hotkey Ctrl+Alt+Q, and your 3D View will switch to look like the one in Figure 2-17.

Figure 2-17: Using the Ctrl+Alt+Q hotkey, you can quickly switch between Blender's regular viewport and a Quad View viewport like some other 3D programs have.

When toggling back to Full View from Quad View, Blender chooses the view that your mouse cursor is hovering over when you do the switch. As a result, when you use the View menu (View⇒Toggle Quad View), you'll almost always pop back to the top view. However, if you use the Ctrl+Alt+Q hotkey with your mouse cursor over one of the other views, Blender will pick that one as Full View.

Regions

In Chapter 1, I briefly describe regions as areas in an editor that give you additional tools specific to that editor. In fact, you've already had exposure to one type of region in this chapter: the header. Figure 2-17 shows the other two regions in Blender's 3D View.

Flanking either side of the 3D View is a Tool Shelf on the left, and on the right is a region for modifying the properties of the 3D View, referred to as the Properties region or the Information region.

The Properties/Information region

You can toggle the visibility of the Properties region by going to View⇒Properties in the header or by pressing N (for iNformation) while your mouse cursor is in the 3D View. In fact, quite a few editors in Blender have a Properties region. And with the exception of the Text Editor, you can consistently open all of them by using the N hotkey.

In the 3D View, the Properties region serves two primary purposes. Most obviously, it allows you to directly modify your selected object by typing in explicit location, rotation, and scale values within the Transform panel. The rest of the region, however, is dedicated to customizing your 3D View. From here, you can control features like the location of the 3D cursor, which axes are displayed, the appearance of the grid floor, and the shading mode used for the Textured Viewport Shading type (Multitexture or GLSL). This region is also where you go if you want to load a background image in the 3D View as a modeling reference. You can find out more about using background images for modeling in Chapter 5.

Because Blender has a Properties editor as well as a Properties region, you may find it useful to think of the Properties region as an Information region instead. It's a game of semantics, but by thinking of it as an Information region, the N hotkey is easier to remember. Throughout the rest of the book, I'll be referring to it as either the Information region or the Properties region for the editor you're working in.

The Tool Shelf

The real gem of a region within the 3D View is the Tool Shelf, shown on the left of the 3D View by default. You can toggle the Tool Shelf's visibility by going to View⇒Tool Shelf in the header or by using the T hotkey.

Think of the Tool Shelf as a place for frequently used tools or operators. Most of these operators also are accessible by hotkey or some other menu, but having shortcuts in the Tool Shelf is extremely helpful for helping you work faster, especially if you haven't memorized all of Blender's various hotkeys. This way, frequently used tools are only a single click away rather than the multiple clicks it might take you to hunt through the menu system. And when it comes to Blender's sculpting and painting tools (covered in Chapter 5 and 8, respectively), the Tool Shelf is indispensable.

The Tool Shelf holds an additional feature that's extremely useful. At the bottom of the Tool Shelf is the Last Operator panel. If you've just opened Blender, this panel should just have the heading of Operator. However, if you perform an action in Blender like moving your selected object or adding a new object, this panel updates to display values relevant to that operation. Using this panel, you can perform a quick, rough operation and then tweak it to be more precise. For example, if you add a UV Sphere to your scene (Shift+A⇒Add Mesh⇒UV Sphere), Blender adds a UV Sphere object to your scene at the location of the 3D cursor with 32 segments and 24 rings. Using the Last Operator panel of the Tool Shelf, you can not only adjust the location of your new sphere, but you can also modify the number of segments and rings it has. You can see more on how the Last Operator panel is used in Chapter 5.

If you happen to have the Tool Shelf hidden, you can still access the last operator panel by pressing F6. Upon doing so, a “floating” Last Operator appears under your mouse cursor. Figure 2-18 shows the floating last operator panel after adding a UV sphere to the scene.

Figure 2-18: You can bring up a floating Last Operator panel by pressing F6.

You should note that the Last Operator panel is only relevant for the last operation you actually performed. It's not a construction history, and it doesn't persistently remain in memory after you perform subsequent operations. For example, if you add a UV Sphere and then immediately rotate that sphere, there's no way for you to adjust the number of segments and rings in it from the Last Operator section. Even if you undo the rotate operation, those Last Operator values won't return (after all, Undo is another operation). The Last Operator section relates to the last thing you did — no more, no less.

Don't know how to do something? Hooray for fully integrated search!

Blender has a search feature that's fully integrated into Blender's interface. If you've been working your way through this chapter, you've probably already used it when adding custom event maps.

The benefit here is that if you know the operation you want to perform, but don't know where to go in Blender's interface to access it, you can simply search for that operator and perform it immediately. How's that for awesome?

The fastest way to access Blender's integrated search feature from any editor is to press Spacebar. A blank menu with a search field at the top appears. From here, simply start typing the name of the operator you want, and Blender updates the menu with search results that match what you've typed. Furthermore, if a hotkey is associated with that operation, it shows up to the right of the operator name in the menu so that you can remember the hotkey in the future. As an example, bring up the search menu (Spacebar) and type save. As you type, the menu updates with operations within Blender that relate to saving.

Using the integrated search feature is a great way to familiarize yourself with the way Blender works, even more so if you're migrating from another program. In that case, you know the terminology for what you want to do; you just have to find out how Blender does it. Figure 2-19 shows Blender's integrated search menu.

Figure 2-19: Blender's integrated search menu is a great way to get familiar with Blender's operators.