WEBVTT

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Now that we know how to change the layout in Blender, let's take a look at some of

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the user preferences to know what we can change within those settings.

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So to get to the user preferences, just go to your file menu and choose user preferences,

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or you can see the hotkey is control alt U. So let's choose user preferences, and then

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we have several different sections with which we can edit.

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Let's just start from left to right and go over to the interface section.

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Inside the interface, you'll find a few things, such as whether to display tool tips, you've

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got your axes or your small axes in the bottom left corner to size.

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We've got things like auto depth, zoomed mouse position, rotate around the selection, which

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most people will want.

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So I will go ahead and turn that on.

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Global pivot, all these different things are smooth view.

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So when you change views, whether it's smooth it or if it just cuts directly to the next

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view, our manipulator handle sizes, those kinds of settings, so more just interface

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tweaks.

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Under the editing section, we then have things like if we duplicate an object with material,

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do we actually duplicate that object or do we link it to the object data such as the

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mesh data or the actual object itself?

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When we add new objects, we want to align it to the world or the active view by default.

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So a lot of different settings here that you can change, again, just that have to do with

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the general editing of objects.

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Next under the input, some of the most prominent ones, we have a few things such as presets.

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By default, Blender ships with its own presets or Maya presets, which these affect the interface

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navigation or the viewport navigation and all hotkeys.

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And so it attempts to emulate Maya in that sense.

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More of these presets should be coming in the near future, but currently Blender only

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ships with Blender or Maya and you'll be able to create your own as you wish.

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Next, a couple of very important things here.

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If you're using a Wacom tablet or any other tablet, you will want to go ahead and enable

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emulate three button mouse and probably continuous grab and also emulate numpad.

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What each one of these do, so first of all, the emulate three button mouse allows you

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to move around the 3D view by substituting the alt plus left mouse button for your middle

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click.

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So if you're working on either a two button mouse, a one button mouse or using a tablet

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by holding down alt, left click and drag, you can rotate the view, alt shift, you can

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pan the view and by holding down alt and control and left click and dragging, you can

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zoom the view.

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So if you don't have a three button mouse, just be sure to add emulate three button mouse.

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The continuous grab allows you to grab an object and when you hit the bounds of the

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viewport, it will just switch over to the other side so that you can continuously move

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across and you're not restricted by screen space.

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Next, we obviously got our drag threshold, our tweak threshold for things like manipulators

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and such and of course the select with either left or right mouse button and again be aware

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that some things in here are basically we the left by default is our action mouse, the

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right is our selection mouse and so inside the hotkeys here, which I'll show you in just

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a moment, there are some things that depend on the action mouse and so if you switch this

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to left, that mount that hotkey or mouse stroke may be switched to the other mouse

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button.

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So just something to be aware of.

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Next, we have our emulate numpad.

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If you're working on a laptop and you want to rotate around the 3D view using our directional

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keys, normally you would press numpad seven, for example, to go to top view, but if you

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don't have a number pad, by enabling emulate numpad, you can use the top row of number

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keys which are normally reserved for switching layers to then switch between your different

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views.

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Next up, we've got whether our orbit style is turntable or trackball, zoom style, dolly,

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continue, scale, etc.

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So all these different settings, then we have this is where all of our hotkeys are, which

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I'm going to go over these in the next video.

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So let's just skip over them for the time being.

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Moving on, we have add-ons.

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Add-ons are simply just small plugins for blender.

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Many of them ship with blender as you can see here are all the different ones that we

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have available and I'll be showing you a few of these specifically as we go along.

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You can also, if you have a custom one, you can install add-ons from the community or

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others that people have written by simply navigating to the correct Python file.

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All these add-ons are written in Python and then you can simply click install.

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You can see all of our different categories here for different add-ons that are available.

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Moving on, we have our themes.

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So if you want to change any color of something within blender, all of these are customizable.

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You can see all the different themes within the graph editor where we go to the 3D view.

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So for example, we can see our active object right now is this one here.

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Currently it's this orange.

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If we are to switch this to a blue, you can see it's automatically just updated right

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in the background.

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No need to confirm it first.

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And so almost anything inside blender is customizable as far as the colors and in some cases the

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size of objects such as the vertex size, outline width, etc.

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You can see all the different sections.

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We also have a few presets for themes that are included such as the hexagon theme or

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the Maya theme or my personal favorite is the ZBrush theme.

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It gives you a nice dark professional look.

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Moving on, we have the file settings.

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So these are things like if you have a default texture path for all your textures, texture

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or sequence plugins, these are actually defunct now but they're still there as options.

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We have default render output, scripts, temporary files, image editor, etc.

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Things like how many versions should Blender save.

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When you save a Blender file in the .blend extension, it will, it will save or if you

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save over an existing file, it will save out a .blend1 or .blend2 or however many versions

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you have here as backup files.

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Also how many recent files do you want to show, things like how often should it autosave,

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etc.

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And lastly, under system, we have general things like the DPI of the interface text,

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whether for sound, whether it's using NUN, SDL, Open AL, compute device for GPU rendering

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in the Cycles render engine.

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Various other things such as the OpenGL lights if you wish to adjust those, things like the

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different color picker types for whichever one you choose as default.

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And then in the case you're working with a, generally a laptop that has an onboard graphics

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card rather than a dedicated one, you have the window draw method.

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If you have difficulty with windows being very slow if you move them or something like

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that, switching the window draw method here between these different settings can sometimes

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fix some issues that you may have inside Blender.

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So obviously there's a very other, many different other settings here that you can adjust but

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I'm not going to go over those in detail.

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Feel free to look around them of course as you get more and more comfortable.

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But I tried to give you the most prominent ones and one other setting if you're on windows

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that you'll most likely want to enable, actually that I forgot to mention is underneath the

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interface is a prompt to quit.

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So if you accidentally quit Blender by using the hotkey which is control Q, it will ask

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whether or not you wish to save, whereas by default it does not actually.

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So many of you will probably want that.