New Features in Blender's 3D View Since 2.5
In addition to the massive changes Blender had under the hood for the 2.5 series with things like the event system refactor, veterans of earlier Blender releases should notice that Blender has had quite a face-lift performed on its interface. The organization of the Properties editor, covered earlier in this chapter in the “Working with the Properties Editor” section, is just one small example. Some of the most prominent updates to Blender's interface have been added to the 3D View. This section outlines a few of these changes.
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 and a user perspective view. In former versions of Blender, re-creating this layout was a somewhat arduous task of manually splitting areas and then setting up each area as a 3D View from each of those perspectives. And worse, 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, this situation is no longer the case. 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 2-15.
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 (ViewToggle 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.
Figure 2-15: 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.
Regions
Figure 2-15 also shows another addition to the 3D View: regions. Regions serve as a replacement for the floating panels of previous Blender versions. The major difference between regions and floating panels is that regions more closely adhere to Blender's non-overlapping philosophy.
You've actually had exposure to one type of region: the header. Like any region, you can collapse, expand, and flip the header region to the opposite side of the area.
Of course, the header isn't the only region available in the 3D View. In Figure 2-15, regions flank either side of the 3D View area. On the left is a Tool Shelf, 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 ViewProperties in the header or by pressing N 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 axis is 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.
The Tool Shelf
You can toggle the Tool Shelf's visibility by going to ViewTool Shelf in the header or by using the T hotkey. Think of the Tool Shelf as a place for frequently used tools or operators, referred to as shortcuts. 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.
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+AAdd MeshUV 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.
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. The Last Operation 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's event system refactor provides one additional side effect that's incredibly useful, especially for new users: a search feature that's fully integrated into Blender's interface.
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 operation 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 menu with a search field at the top appears. Start typing the name of the operation you want to perform, and Blender updates the menu with search results that match what you typed. Furthermore, hotkeys show 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, especially 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 2-16 shows Blender's integrated search menu.
Figure 2-16: Blender's integrated search menu is a great way to get familiar with Blender's operators.
