Customizing Blender to Fit You

You can really 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. At this point in time, 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.

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 seven presets: Animation, Compositing, Default, Game Logic, 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 sidebar in this chapter) at the top of the window in the Info editor, 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.

The screens, and therefore the order that they're cycled through when you press Ctrl+← or →, 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 create to your own custom layout, creating a horizontal Properties editor layout or a multimonitor 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 Scene datablock. When you're happy with changes you've made and you want to have these screens available each time you start Blender, save your settings by going to the User Preferences editor (Ctrl+Alt+U) and clicking the Save As Default button at the bottom of the editor or using the Ctrl+U hotkey.

• If the editor's header has menus, you can left-click the minus icon at the left of the header. The text menus collapse from view so that they're out of the way when you don't need them.
• If you still don't have enough space after collapsing the menus, 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. You can also hover your mouse cursor over the header and user your scroll wheel. This feature is particularly handy for people who work on computers with small monitors.

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.

To change your user preferences, go to FileUser Preferences (Ctrl+Alt+U), and Blender creates a new window just for the User Preferences editor. Although you can change any area to a User Preferences editor, it is sometimes nicer to use the File menu method because you don't have to replace or split any of your existing areas to get a 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. For example, enabling Auto Depth and Zoom to Mouse Position in large scenes 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. If you go to your 3D View and choose ViewCamera (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.
• 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.

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

Editing

The next set of options is related to the act of editing objects. The most relevant options in this section relate to Blender's Undo feature. The options related to Undo are pretty important. From the Editing section, 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 multiresolution sculpting tools (see Chapter 5).

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 2-4 shows, this section is extensive.

Figure 2-4: 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 that match other 3D programs. You can use this datablocklike 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, particularly Macintosh machines and some tablet PCs. 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 added in Blender 2.5 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. 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 Trackball setting. However, users who are familiar with other 3D programs might prefer the Turntable setting. The difference may seem subtle to a new user, but it can be very disorienting for users of other software packages who may be used to turntable orbit style.
• 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 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. You can manage all add-ons from the Add-Ons section of User Preferences.

Add-ons come in primarily two types: Officially Supported and Community Supported. You can use the buttons on the left side of the Add-Ons section in User Preferences to filter which types you see. By default, all community supported add-ons that ship with Blender are disabled. Most officially supported add-ons are for importing and exporting file types to and from other programs. The bulk of these add-ons are enabled by default. To enable or disable a specific add-on, just 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. 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, as shown in Figure 2-5. I took almost all the screenshots for this book by using a variation of the Default theme, lightened for readability. 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.

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

File

The File options relate to how Blender works with files. Figure 2-6 shows the settings in this section of the User Preferences editor.

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/.

  Unfortunately for users of Microsoft's Windows operating system, this location doesn't make any sense and actually doesn't even exist. If you're using Windows, I strongly advise that you change this location to C:WindowsTemp or create a folder called tmp on your C: drive. Linux users may also 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.

  Figure 2-6: The File options in User Preferences.

  

• 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.

  The Compress File option is handy because it makes your .blend project files smaller when you save. The Load UI option 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.

  If you're opening a file that was created in earlier versions of Blender that relied on the horizontal layout, you may want to disable the Load UI option so that your file opens in the new Blender layout.

• 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 lifesaver. 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 files in the same place you saved your .blend files. Those .blend1 files are the earlier version. 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 FileOpen Recent or press Shift+Ctrl+O. You can also use the File Browser (F1 or Ctrl+O) and look on the side region under the Recent heading.
  • 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.

System

Whereas the Interface options dictate how you interact with Blender, the options in the System section, shown in Figure 2-7, tend to dictate more how Blender interacts with you. Many options here are geared toward optimizing for performance, and generally the defaults work well.

Some of the more interesting options follow:

• 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 VBOs (Vertex Buffer Objects). 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.

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

  

• 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.

• Color Picker Type: Speaking of color pickers, the latest version of Blender added a new circular color picker widget, which is generally much 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. Left-click the color swatches on the Solid OpenGL Lights and see which color picker suits you the best.

Using custom event maps

With earlier versions of Blender, the event system was hard-coded and based on a design from the early 1990s. This setup not only made extending Blender difficult, but it also prevented Blender's interface from giving more instantaneous feedback. As an example, when you resize an area in Blender now, the editors in each area update while you're moving.

As an even more apparent benefit of the event system refactor, you've gained 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!

If you refer to Figure 2-4, 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 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 to 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 FileNew. Go to that menu item, but don't click it yet. Instead, proceed to the next step.

2. Right-click the menu item for the operation and choose Change Shortcut from the menu that appears.

   In this example, go to FileNew, 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.

   In this case, you press Ctrl+X. Your new hotkey is assigned!

Figure 2-8 shows this process in action.

Figure 2-8: Customizing a hotkey sequence directly from Blender's menus.

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, labeled Filter, in the upper right corner of the Input section:

1. In the 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.

2. After you find the event you want, left-click the Edit button to the right of that event's category.

   All available events for the category are now editable, and the Edit button changes to a Restore button. If at any time you decide that you want to revert to the system defaults, click the Restore button. Everything goes back to the way it initially was.

3. 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.

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 2-9 shows an expanded event.

Figure 2-9: Blender gives you a lot of custom control over its event system.

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.