What we have here is five windows and we can tell the contents of each window by
taking a look at the far left of each header bar in each window. So if we come
down to the bottom left here we can see that there's this little cube icon there
with some couple of triangles which means that we can basically click on
here and we can see all the various different windows that we've got
available to us within Blender and this one is the 3d view so you can swap the
contents of this view by just clicking something else on the list there. Just
below the 3d view we've got the timeline and on the right hand side we've got
another two windows we've got the outliner at the top which is just going
to give us a kind of list like view of everything in our scene and below that
we've got the properties window and at the top here is our fifth final window
we've got the info window which doesn't really look like much of a window I
realize it looks more like just a typical menu bar but if we left click
and drag on the line that segments between the 3d view and this header bar
here at the top we get this double arrow headed icon that means that we can now
left click and drag here up and down to just resize things and you can see the
contents of the info window are just sort of squished up at the top there and
this is the sort of thing which is pretty handy for scripting and so on so
I'm just going to left click and drag that back into place and you may be
forgiven for thinking that this was a window as well because it sort of
doesn't look too different to this properties window over on the right hand
side but this is actually just a tool shelf this is a sidebar so we've got the
T key which can toggle that on and off and it basically belongs to the 3d view
which is why it doesn't really have its own icon so the contents of the tool
shelf which is as I say toggled on and off with the T key we can see that it's
divided into sort of two main parts one is the list like view that we have of
the various different options there the various different tools and we have the
tabs down the side which have basically serve as categories of the various
tools that we've got and this is just to save us from having to scroll too far to
find what we're looking for now we can you press the N key to take a look on
the right hand side of the view and that's going to that's N for November
by the way and that's going to show us the property sidebar and we can scroll
down the view there with the middle mouse wheel and we can do the same thing
on this side we can use the middle mouse wheel to scroll but we don't need to
because it's fairly compact on that particular tab but if we click on some
of these other ones we can see we slightly get reason to scroll there and
something else that we can do in here is hold ctrl and middle mouse wheel up and
down to just kind of quickly scroll through the various tabs that we've got
there if you want to just quickly get down to the bottom and you're kind of
looking for something that speeds things up for you so as indicated before we've
got these double arrow headed icons that we can use to resize the screen and we
can do that with the sidebars as well in fact we can squish them all the way in
and you can see sometimes you get these little plus icons then which should just
be able to flip them back open again or as I say we've got the T key and the N
key they're gonna come in pretty handy we're gonna be using them a lot we've
also got the headers themselves can be left click and dragged down to hide them
and then you can see that we get a little plus icon for those as well so
not only can we sort of customize the dimensions of all the screens we can
actually just quickly launch into various different preset layouts that we
can take advantage of so for example we can come up to the top in our header of
the info window and we can left click on this where it says default to the side
of it and this is going to show us various different window layouts
depending on the kind of task that we might be trying to achieve in blender so
for example we might like to be doing some scripting so if we click over to
that we get more of the info window and we get the Python console down the side
there a text editor perhaps we might like to try use some UV editing which of
course we're going to be doing a little bit later on and that's just going to
show us the UV image editor and the 3d view on the right hand side and we can
actually scroll through these fairly quickly by just holding control and
using the left or right arrows to just kind of go through there and we can come
back to our default view to create our own custom layout we can just click on
this plus icon there and that will duplicate the currently loaded screen
layout and then we can just rename this to something more meaningful like
default custom in this case and then we can resize windows to however we like we
can change the contents of them and then when we switch back to the default view
you can see that it's remembered that there and when we go control right arrow
to basically go down this list here so control left will take you up and
control right will take you down you can see it's remembered all our layout
and that will remember whether we've resized things whether we've taken
windows away added extras or change the contents of them or what have you if you
don't like it you can just click on the X icon and that will remove the layout
from this list so that takes us to our next issue which is how to create extra
windows and take them away again so I think the easiest way to do this is just
to come to the gap between two windows so for example if we just come down here
that's anywhere where we get that double arrow-headed icon there just to resize a
window so while we're on there if we right-click we get the area options which
is split area and join area and when we let's choose split area first you can
see we're gonna split the 3d view there somehow or if we just come down here we
can see that we're gonna split the timeline so let's split the 3d view and
you can see now we've got duplicate of that and if we want to join them again
let's just go in between right click and then join the area and then we can get
this large overlaid arrow showing us that we're gonna collapse the in this
case the left hand sided window into the right hand side so let's just left click
and do that another way we can do that is by just coming to the top right hand
corner of any of these windows and you'll see this three line little lines
that we have there and when you get in that corner your icon should change to a
little plus symbol and that allows us to left click and drag down to split
down and then left click and drag to the left in this case to split sideways and
we can also collapse by just sort of doing that in reverse order we can left
click and dragged into this window to collapse it we have to make sure that we
still have our left mouse button pressed and that means we can actually change
which area we're going to collapse into until we let go in which case it then
collapses and then we're going to need to collapse up into this window now so
it can be a little bit tricky you may need to play with exactly how that works
to split areas and so on but I think you'll get the hang of it so something
else that we can do is we can go full screen with shift space with the cursor
while in any area that we have here we can maximize the timeline by making sure
our cursor is down here and then pressing shift space and then shift space
to toggle it back to where it was and then same with the properties and then
shift space to toggle it back down again there is another way to do that so
similarly to the way that we were going control left and right arrow to toggle
through the custom layout the layouts I should say we also have control and up
arrow to be able to if we just press that twice it toggles it through you can
also just go control down arrow they basically all do the same thing
something else that we can do is quickly pop out of view so if we're at the top
here we've got this plus icon we can just hold shift and left click and then
drag out the window and that allows us to now sort of reposition this on a
separate monitor if we like or we can close that down we can also swap the
contents so if we press control and left click in the same place where you get
that plus icon in the top right hand side you can get this other little icon
that you get once you drag into the view and that means you're going to swap those
views round so the 3d view now becomes at the bottom the timeline is at the
top and then we can just control left click and drag into the each other's
window to swap the contents around again so that's all I think you'll need
regarding customizing the layouts and generally moving the windows around so
let's move on