So next along the 3D views header bar is these layers and we've got these 20 layers to play
with.
We've got the first one is currently selected.
You can kind of see a little gray box of the first one.
If we left click on another one of these, you can see that this one's now selected.
And that basically means it's going to show in the 3D view the contents of that layer
and there isn't anything in that particular layer that I've selected and that's why the
screen has gone all blank.
So if we just click on the first layer again, we should bring everything back.
We can move things around by pressing the M key and that allows us to move to layer
and we've got this plane selected right now.
So let's move that to the second layer and you can see the difference that we get down
here.
In fact, we get a little circle showing up in that second layer now to show us that there
is something in there.
You can kind of make out that it's orange as well to show us that that's the object that
we happen to have selected.
Also take a look over in the properties window under the object tab, you can see under the
relations area that this is now in the second layer and we can kind of jump it around into
different layers if we like and you can see it's now jumping around down here as well.
So let's just move that back into the first layer.
If we want to be able to see multiple layers, we can just shift select and then we'll be
able to see everything that's going on in the first five layers now.
We can keep this fairly simple and just click on the first layer and just sort of leave
it at that for now.
Of course, these layers do correspond with the layers management add-on that we have
enabled and you can kind of see more details about that here as well.
This is just another way of being able to represent this information down here, it just
gives us a little bit more options to play with.
Moving on from the layers, we have our proportional editing option.
So if I enable that, it's then going to give us a fall-off type that we can then choose.
What this basically means is if we press G to start moving this object, this single plane
that we have selected, we get this circle that shows up, this white circle, which is
going to give us our radius of influence.
If we use our middle mouse wheel, we can kind of scroll that sphere of influence up.
When we start moving now, we can start to include that cube into our movement and you
can see it's only moving a subtle amount because it's the perimeter of our influence.
The kind of more that it gets sucked into the middle of the sphere of influence, the
more it's going to start moving and that's a nice organic way of being able to move things
around.
I'm just going to right-click to just abort that though and then we can also just disable
that option there.
Let's take a look at one of the last things along the header bar now, which is this snapping
area.
This first magnet icon is going to allow us to enable our snapping and this next icon
next to it will allow us to pull down a menu to change our various different snap elements.
So at the moment, it's set to incrementally along the grid.
So what that actually means is if I press 7 on the numpad to jump to a top orthographic
view, press Z to toggle the wireframe and let's zoom in a little bit by scrolling the
mouse wheel, you can see that the object at the moment isn't actually on the grid.
What we might like to do is just zoom out a little bit more, get these larger grid spacings
and then what we can do is start to move along the X axis and you can see it's still got
all these extra digits.
You might have wanted it to be just say 4 and so that's an important point to make that
the incrementally snapping option here is just going to allow you to move incrementally
along the grid.
It's not going to snap you to the grid.
To be able to do that, just got to remember that we've got this other snap menu which
is Shift S and that means we can now, the top of that is selection to grid and then
when you do that, this rounds out these figures and snaps us to the grid for us and now when
we start moving, translate along the X axis in this case, you can see that it was snapping
on along the grid now that we're actually snapped to the grid which we had to manually
do in the first place.
So that's just something to bear in mind.
Once you zoom in and you get some smaller grid spacings, you can see that we can now
sort of snap along and well move incrementally along those smaller grid spacings.
So let's just take a quick look at another option in here.
So for example, like vertices and we've got this cube sat next to us.
So let's press G and then just gesture over to this vertex in the top right of the cube
and then we can just left click to just confirm that translation.
And what happened there was it used the closest vertex in the plane to snap to the vertex
that we indicated to on the cube.
So we can set that to something else like say the median point instead and then press
G and then sort of snap to it and you can see the median point of the vertices of the
plane is now the point that it got snapped to.
Let's sort of, sometimes a good way of being able to use that tool is to say if you wanted
to snap it from this point so that this point of the plane was snapping to that area is
to just move it fairly close first and then you can indicate the closest and press G and
then just indicate onto that and now basically that is in position now.
Also we can just disable the option by clicking on it there but we don't have to necessarily
just come and manually click it on.
We can also once we start to move we can press CTRL and that will now toggle our while
we hold CTRL we're now snapping.
So now we can, as you can see, we're now basically snapping onto the various different vertices
that we select to and then when you let go then it's no longer snapping still because
we've let go of our CTRL key which is kind of our modifier for snapping while translating.
Finally we have these two last buttons which are our open GL viewport render buttons.
The first is for a still image and the second will output an animation if you have one set
up.
Basically this means a very simple render of what we're looking at in our viewport as
opposed to the other main render buttons which will render from the active camera and process
all the complicated lighting bounces and mirrors and transparency and whatever else you might
have going on in the scene that needs time to calculate.
Options for these, by the way, can be found at the top in the render menu.
These first two are the main render buttons, F12 and CTRL F12.
The next down are these two buttons that are at the far right of the header bar that we've
just been talking about, the open GL render and the open GL render animation and you can
also see the options for these here as well.
So that wraps up the 3D view bars header and now it's time to get on with some modeling.