Now that we know how to change the layout in Blender, let's take a look at some of
the user preferences to know what we can change within those settings.
So to get to the user preferences, just go to your file menu and choose user preferences,
or you can see the hotkey is control alt U. So let's choose user preferences, and then
we have several different sections with which we can edit.
Let's just start from left to right and go over to the interface section.
Inside the interface, you'll find a few things, such as whether to display tool tips, you've
got your axes or your small axes in the bottom left corner to size.
We've got things like auto depth, zoomed mouse position, rotate around the selection, which
most people will want.
So I will go ahead and turn that on.
Global pivot, all these different things are smooth view.
So when you change views, whether it's smooth it or if it just cuts directly to the next
view, our manipulator handle sizes, those kinds of settings, so more just interface
tweaks.
Under the editing section, we then have things like if we duplicate an object with material,
do we actually duplicate that object or do we link it to the object data such as the
mesh data or the actual object itself?
When we add new objects, we want to align it to the world or the active view by default.
So a lot of different settings here that you can change, again, just that have to do with
the general editing of objects.
Next under the input, some of the most prominent ones, we have a few things such as presets.
By default, Blender ships with its own presets or Maya presets, which these affect the interface
navigation or the viewport navigation and all hotkeys.
And so it attempts to emulate Maya in that sense.
More of these presets should be coming in the near future, but currently Blender only
ships with Blender or Maya and you'll be able to create your own as you wish.
Next, a couple of very important things here.
If you're using a Wacom tablet or any other tablet, you will want to go ahead and enable
emulate three button mouse and probably continuous grab and also emulate numpad.
What each one of these do, so first of all, the emulate three button mouse allows you
to move around the 3D view by substituting the alt plus left mouse button for your middle
click.
So if you're working on either a two button mouse, a one button mouse or using a tablet
by holding down alt, left click and drag, you can rotate the view, alt shift, you can
pan the view and by holding down alt and control and left click and dragging, you can
zoom the view.
So if you don't have a three button mouse, just be sure to add emulate three button mouse.
The continuous grab allows you to grab an object and when you hit the bounds of the
viewport, it will just switch over to the other side so that you can continuously move
across and you're not restricted by screen space.
Next, we obviously got our drag threshold, our tweak threshold for things like manipulators
and such and of course the select with either left or right mouse button and again be aware
that some things in here are basically we the left by default is our action mouse, the
right is our selection mouse and so inside the hotkeys here, which I'll show you in just
a moment, there are some things that depend on the action mouse and so if you switch this
to left, that mount that hotkey or mouse stroke may be switched to the other mouse
button.
So just something to be aware of.
Next, we have our emulate numpad.
If you're working on a laptop and you want to rotate around the 3D view using our directional
keys, normally you would press numpad seven, for example, to go to top view, but if you
don't have a number pad, by enabling emulate numpad, you can use the top row of number
keys which are normally reserved for switching layers to then switch between your different
views.
Next up, we've got whether our orbit style is turntable or trackball, zoom style, dolly,
continue, scale, etc.
So all these different settings, then we have this is where all of our hotkeys are, which
I'm going to go over these in the next video.
So let's just skip over them for the time being.
Moving on, we have add-ons.
Add-ons are simply just small plugins for blender.
Many of them ship with blender as you can see here are all the different ones that we
have available and I'll be showing you a few of these specifically as we go along.
You can also, if you have a custom one, you can install add-ons from the community or
others that people have written by simply navigating to the correct Python file.
All these add-ons are written in Python and then you can simply click install.
You can see all of our different categories here for different add-ons that are available.
Moving on, we have our themes.
So if you want to change any color of something within blender, all of these are customizable.
You can see all the different themes within the graph editor where we go to the 3D view.
So for example, we can see our active object right now is this one here.
Currently it's this orange.
If we are to switch this to a blue, you can see it's automatically just updated right
in the background.
No need to confirm it first.
And so almost anything inside blender is customizable as far as the colors and in some cases the
size of objects such as the vertex size, outline width, etc.
You can see all the different sections.
We also have a few presets for themes that are included such as the hexagon theme or
the Maya theme or my personal favorite is the ZBrush theme.
It gives you a nice dark professional look.
Moving on, we have the file settings.
So these are things like if you have a default texture path for all your textures, texture
or sequence plugins, these are actually defunct now but they're still there as options.
We have default render output, scripts, temporary files, image editor, etc.
Things like how many versions should Blender save.
When you save a Blender file in the .blend extension, it will, it will save or if you
save over an existing file, it will save out a .blend1 or .blend2 or however many versions
you have here as backup files.
Also how many recent files do you want to show, things like how often should it autosave,
etc.
And lastly, under system, we have general things like the DPI of the interface text,
whether for sound, whether it's using NUN, SDL, Open AL, compute device for GPU rendering
in the Cycles render engine.
Various other things such as the OpenGL lights if you wish to adjust those, things like the
different color picker types for whichever one you choose as default.
And then in the case you're working with a, generally a laptop that has an onboard graphics
card rather than a dedicated one, you have the window draw method.
If you have difficulty with windows being very slow if you move them or something like
that, switching the window draw method here between these different settings can sometimes
fix some issues that you may have inside Blender.
So obviously there's a very other, many different other settings here that you can adjust but
I'm not going to go over those in detail.
Feel free to look around them of course as you get more and more comfortable.
But I tried to give you the most prominent ones and one other setting if you're on windows
that you'll most likely want to enable, actually that I forgot to mention is underneath the
interface is a prompt to quit.
So if you accidentally quit Blender by using the hotkey which is control Q, it will ask
whether or not you wish to save, whereas by default it does not actually.
So many of you will probably want that.