Essential Blender- P27 pot

Chapter 14: Preferences and Options: Customizing Blender By Roland Hess In Chapter 2: The Blender Interface, you learned how to configure screens, windows and panels to suit your workflow, and how to save that configuration as your default (Ctrl-U). Blender offers even more customization than that, in a "hidden" preferences screen. Open Blender and take a look at the header at the very top of the screen. Figure PO.01: The main header. This header is just like any other in Blender, and if you carefully examine the screen layout, you will realize that the 3D Window below it already has a header. So, which view is this one the header for? Place the mouse over the line between this top header and the top of the 3D view. The cursor changes to the double-headed arrow symbol, indicating that you can LMB drag to change view sizes. LMB on the line and drag downward. You've just expanded and shown the User Preferences window. Figure PO.02: The "super-secret" user preferences panel, exposed. Let's go through the different sections of the User Preferences, highlighting some of the more useful options. Feel free to experiment with the options that aren't covered here — the tooltips you see when hovering the mouse over a control can give you some more information about available settings —and don't worry about messing things up. As long as you don't use Ctrl-U, the changes you make will not be saved as your default. View & Controls If you really cannot stand the way that Blender uses the RMB for selection, you can change it here. The "Select With" option allows you to swap the left and right mouse button functionality. Just remember that if you set Select to use the LMB, all tutorials and instructions will be backwards from now. If you think that getting used to new selection methods is tough, try doing a tutorial with inverted instructions! Figure PO.03: The “Select With” preference for switching the left and right mouse buttons. The "View rotation" control can be useful when you will be focusing your work on a single object for a while. Setting this to use "Turntable" and "Around Active" will cause MMB view rotation to keep the Active Object as the center of view rotation, allowing you to easily change the viewing angle of the object in question without having to worry about losing it in the 3D View. Figure PO.04: "Around Active" is great when working for long periods on a single object. Other helpful options are: The “View Name” button in the Display controls on the far left. View Name displays the name of the current view (Front, Top, Camera, Side, etc.) in the upper left corner of all 3D windows, helping you to maintain your orientation at a glance. “Emulate 3 Button Mouse.” If you are working with a mouse that has no middle button, or on a laptop with a touchpad or ministick, enabling this option will allow you to simulate a MMB click by holding down the Alt key while use the LMB. So, the Shift-MMB combination that pans the view would be accessible by using Alt-Shift-LMB instead. Zooming is Ctrl-Alt-LMB. View rotation becomes Alt-LMB. Edit Methods The "Auto keyframe" controls are a handy tool for animators. You will recall from the animation chapters that keyframes are set by using the I-key, followed by a LMB click on the appropriate key types. Turning on the "Action and Object" button in this control set will cause Blender to automatically insert keys at the current frame whenever an object or bone is transformed. The "Available" button will modify this behavior slightly, only setting keys for Ipo channels that have already been keyed. This means that if you have manually set keyframes for an object's location, then both move and rotate it, only keys for the translation will be automatically set, while the rotation will not receive a key. Figure PO.05: Auto keyframe controls can speed up your animation workflow. Undo If you are dealing with enormous scenes that contain large amounts of high-polygon meshes or animation data, Blender's Undo system might cause your computer to drastically slow down due to memory requirements. If you find this happening on a particular scene, you can alleviate the problem by reducing the Undo “Steps” that Blender keeps around, or take the even more drastic measure of turning off “Global Undo” altogether. Of course, this means you're working without the safety net of Undo. Just remember to save backup copies of your previous work! Language & Font Figure PO.06: Blender can change its display to anti-aliased fonts. By default, only a single un-activated button appears in this section of the preferences. Turning on "International Fonts" will cause an immediate change to the whole Blender interface. The font changes and becomes nicely anti-aliased. This alternate method of viewing the interface can slow Blender down a bit, but if you like the look, it may be worth it for you. Once International Fonts have been enabled, you can change the main font and font size for the interface and even select from (at this point) eighteen different translations. Please note that not all translations are complete. Themes Themes affect the way that Blender draws the interface elements themselves. The simplest way to see this is to change from "Default" to "Rounded" in the dropdown menu. Figure PO.07: The “Rounded” theme. After you change from the Default theme, all of the theme configuration tools are exposed. If you want to spend the time, you can use these controls to customize the drawing of every widget in the interface. You can even save a Theme you've created through the File menu. Choose “Export” near the bottom of the File menu and select “Save current theme " to bring up a window that will save your current theme into your Scripts directory. The created .py file can be shared with other Blender users so that they too can experience the genius of your theming skills. Figure PO.07.1: “Save current theme…” in the File->Export menu. Of course, you can also obtain themes from other users as well (do a web search on "Blender Themes"). To activate a theme that you've downloaded, place it in your scripts folder, then run Blender. Change one of your windows into a Scripts window (the one with the snake icon), then find the Themes entry within the Scripts menu on the header. Figure PO.07.2: Selecting a created Theme from the Scripts menu. Selecting a named theme here will add it to the selectable themes menu in the User Preferences window. Figure PO.07.3: Once you click the Theme's script, it is added to the Themes selector in the preferences window. If you like the theme, remember to use Ctrl-U to save it into your default configuration. Otherwise, you will have to re-import it every time you run Blender. Auto Save While you work, Blender saves temporary files for you behind the scenes. This can be great, especially if your system (or Blender) crashes, leaving you with unsaved work. Go to this preferences screen and press the "Open Recent" button, which will load the most recently saved temporary file, hopefully resurrecting at least some of your work. If you are a paranoid person with an unstable system, you may want to set "Minutes" as low as "1," so a backup file is saved once every minute.