At this point, I'd like to take a moment to go through the slight tweaks and changes
I make from the default version of Blender that I think is going to help us here.
Let's start with auto depth, and what this is all about is if I just demonstrate the
behaviour without it on first of all.
If I'm trying to rotate around this cube that I've got in the foreground, there's no real
problem with it because I've just sort of framed up on it by hitting the period or full
stop on the numpad, just like that.
If I want to now work on this cube in the background that I have embedded over there,
it's very, very tricky to sort of zoom into there.
In fact, I've actually stopped, I've sort of been locked and can't go any further.
This happens in a lot of 3D programs.
The best way normally to get over there is to hit that period on the numpad, just to
basically frame up into it, just to view the selected.
Now we can sort of rotate around that nice and easily, but we can't get back over to
this one without, again, selecting and then zooming back into it with the period on the
numpad.
This is what this auto perspective option is all about.
We can launch our user preferences with Ctrl Alt and U, and then we can find under the
interface, under the view manipulation, we have auto depth, and I'm just going to enable
that.
What that means is if we try to now zoom over to this one, so we can still rotate around
this one, this is fine, and if we try and take a look at what's going over here, we
can now pan a lot more easily because it recognises the distance underneath the cursor, and now
if I try to zoom in, you can sort of see that we can basically easily zoom back in, and
now it's starting to sort of slow down the responsiveness of the zoom as I get near to
what I'm trying to manipulate.
So again, I find it kind of much easier to sort of navigate through, and I haven't had
to zoom into anything.
The next thing I'd like to change is the way in which we can swap between various different
camera viewing angles.
So for example, if we press number one on the numpad, we can switch to our front view,
and this is a front perspective.
And if we actually go to bring up our user preferences, again with control alt and U,
and let's see, if we enable our auto perspective there, basically this means that if I was
to press one on the numpad again, you can see it's actually assumed that what we want
is an orthographic view, and usually for me at least that's true, so I have that option
enabled.
So if we press seven to go to top view, this is an orthographic view, and if we just start
to rotate out of this view, it snaps us into a perspective view without having to press
the five on the numpad to toggle it.
We can still of course press five to toggle if that isn't what we want at that point,
but for me I find that it reduces an extra couple of key presses that I would almost
always be making otherwise without that option on.
The next thing I'd like to talk about are the add-ons.
So if we just again launch our user preferences with control alt and U, and we come over to
the add-ons tab, we can see these are a bunch of sort of mini programs if you like, which
extends Blender's functionality.
And in particular, the one I'm looking for for now is the layer management, which happens
to be the fourth one down in this case.
Basically what we're looking at here is on the left hand side there's some filters, so
it's initially divided up into supported level.
So these are official add-ons, these are ones developed by the community, and these are
ones considered to be in testing stage, which aren't showing right now, but if we shift
selected that one, we would have those included in what is showing up on our right hand side.
And then a little bit lower, we have categories, and this is showing all categories, but you
could sort of filter them down to ones just to show the 3D view related add-ons if you
like.
And as I say, the one we want is the layer management.
But if we open this up, we can get a little bit more information about it.
And in particular, what might be quite important for us is to see a link to the documentation
or to see where this will show up basically.
So we want the location and we'll find it in the tool shelf, and it'll be under a layers
tab.
So all we need to do is just enable it by checking the icon on the right hand side,
and then that's that, we can just close.
So if we press T to bring up our tool shelf, we can see, if we take a look on our tabs
at the bottom now, we have this layers tab.
And if we just pull this out a little bit more by left clicking and dragging it out
where the border of the tool shelf is, and then just click on the down arrow for the
layer management, we can basically see that what this is going to do is it's just going
to represent all the layers in our scene.
And the layers are actually found elsewhere by default, which is in the header of the
3D view.
And we can see the 20 layers that we've got at our disposal there.
Now the necessity I feel for this add-on is just to give us some description to our various
different layers.
So it's very easy to forget where we were when coming back to an old file.
But in this case, we can say this is where we put our main items in the scene or something
like that.
We've got a few extra options here to be able to clean things up by just hiding the
empty layers, for example.
So that's an add-on that I would recommend having enabled and definitely encourage you
to go through there and see what else you might find is a cool addition.
One more thing to tweak in our user preferences.
So again, Ctrl Alt U is in the final tab, the system tab, and this is the VBOs.
So I'm just going to enable that option.
And basically, this means that we'll get much smoother viewport performance once the
poly counts really start to rise.
And it's not on by default simply due to incompatibility with some older graphics cards, but in most
cases, it should work okay.
So I'm just going to enable that.
And then once we've made all our preferences, if we want to be able to save them so that
the next time we open Blender, it's remembered all of that, we want to come down to here
where it says Save User Settings, and then just click Save User Settings.
And then we can just close our user preferences.