Okay, welcome to chapter two.
In this chapter, I want to show you a few different things that you can do to customize
Blender to fit your workflow.
Since you already are familiar with other applications or are likely familiar with other
applications, there's a very good chance that you already have a preferred interface layout,
some preferred hotkeys, and by customizing some things in Blender, it will allow you
to get up to speed faster.
So the first thing I'm going to show you is how to customize the Blender interface.
So luckily, Blender's interface is very, very customizable.
We can use any layout we wish.
We can switch between quad view and regular view or any other number of things.
So the first thing to understand is windows inside Blender.
Windows not in the normal sense of a different window.
There's no floating windows in Blender, but window types in Blender are every single one
of these panels.
Every single one of these panels, including the viewport, the outliner, the properties
panel, and the timeline, and even the top header bar right here, each one of these are
different window types.
And you can change the window type of any active view by using the icon in the bottom
left corner.
So if you choose this icon here, you'll notice that we then have all of our different editor
or window types that we wish to choose from.
So if we wanted to switch the 3D viewport over to the graph editor for our animation
curves, we can simply change that.
Or if we want to change our timeline over to the dope sheet, we can change that.
So any one of these can be changed to any view that we wish.
If you want to add multiple views, so let's say if we want to do a dual viewport layout
here or maybe one side we want an image editor and the other side we want the viewport.
There's two different ways you can do that.
One is to use the split handles that you'll find at the bottom left right here and top
right of every single window.
If you just hover your mouse over these and then left click and drag in the direction
that you wish to split.
So in this case, if I want to split this view here and I use the top right handle,
I can just left click and drag and draw across there and it will split that view duplicating
whichever region that I currently used.
So now I have two separate viewports.
Each one of these are independent, but of course show the exact same content.
If I then change this view over to the UV image editor, I then have two different views
that again I can use for different purposes.
The other way to split views, let's just assume for a moment that I wanted to get a graph
editor in here, is to hover your mouse over the dividing bar between those views until
you have the double ended arrow and then you can simply right click and choose split area
or join area.
So if I choose split area, I'll get a new line and allows me to move where I wish before
splitting.
If you wish to change the orientation, just middle click and it will change the direction
of the split.
When you're ready to split, just left click and you now have two views again, again which
you can then change the type.
If you want to merge these back together, so if I want to just get back to one view,
I can either use the handles here again or by right clicking.
So if I wanted to use the handles, the way that you do it is you drag towards the window
that you want to merge into.
So if I want to merge into this view, I'm going to click and drag here, left click up
and I'll get an overlay arrow.
At this point, I could actually reverse the direction but I'll just go ahead and confirm
over that and I'll just release my mouse and it will merge those two together.
The other way to do it is by right clicking with the double ended arrow, I right click
and choose join area and then you can choose which one you want to merge over.
So I'll just merge over here, giving me back to my 3D view.
Now once you're done customizing this, you want to go ahead and save your defaults.
The way that you can do this is by going up to file and save user settings.
The one thing to be aware of at this point in Blender 2.63, now I'm actually using a
release candidate since this will be available very soon, but in Blender 2.63, any scene
that you currently have up will also be saved in your default settings.
So if you had an active scene that you are working on here and you go to file, save user
settings, that scene will then become your default file that will be loaded anytime you
create a new file or open Blender.
So anytime you change these settings or to set your defaults, you're going to want to
load up a default scene first and then change your settings and save your user settings.