Blender 2.7 Tutorial #2 : Understanding the User Interface & Preferences #b3d

hello and welcome art to my video series on how to use blender 2.7 in this video we'll be talking all about blenders user interface we'll learn how to understand it all we'll learn how to customize it and in the last part of this video we'll set up blender so it works for the rest of this whole video series it will work easier for you from now on if using a newer version of blender that's totally ok I'm using bladder 2.70 a which is available to me right now if you're using a newer version pretty much nothing will be different if there is any large differences in the future I'll make a new video in this video series to update both for those changes let's go ahead and click on the splash screen to get rid of it now blender is very very user customizable and it's built on these things called windows the screen right now is made of a bunch of windows we'll talk about them right now the most obvious one is your 3d viewport window it'll be large aspartyl your screen and at the left side of that window is what's called your tool shelf and this tool shelf if you don't want it they can be hidden with the T key which is the keyboard shortcut to show it and hide it and on this tool shelf is a lot of common tasks that you'll need to perform all working in the 3d viewport one of the most recent changes to blender are the addition of these new tabs which divide up this tool shelf into different sections based on what kind of tasks you're currently performing if you're currently working with an object and you want to move it in or rotate or scale it there are buttons for that which are basically just buttons in place of keyboard shortcuts like G and R and s but here you could also do things like mere objects and delete objects and joint objects together and there are lots of other tasks like that if you have different types of objects selected like a camera or a lamp there'll be different options for you depending on if you have a mesh selected or something else there are other tabs in here for creating objects this is just like your add menu with the shift a key but you have a place for it always in your screen if you so desire we have a tab for relation so setting up relationships between different objects in your scene for animation for physics and for using what's called a grease pencil which we might talk about in a future video generally I don't use this tool shelf too often but sometimes at the bottom of this window especially when you add new objects though we have very important options down here we'll talk about that in the next video whenever you hide something in blender you'll see one of these little pluses and you'll see it when you hide the tool shelf and so if there's ever a little plus and you want to see what that plus does well you'll know something is is kind of hidden so you can click on it if you forget a keyboard shortcut and that thing will pop up if you drag this panel away you'll notice that as soon as that's all the way gone it sort of snaps away and that plus comes back so that tool shelf is the T key on the right side of that 3d viewport though is what's called your properties panel and of course you can click the plus to make it show up but the keyboard shortcut for that properties paddle is the N key I'm not sure why they picked and T is obvious for tool shelf but n it's not so obvious for properties in this properties panel our properties for your whole window and for the objects that you have selected so right now I have this cube selected and in the transform section of this properties panel which I can collapse obviously it shows me the location coordinates the rotation degrees and the scale and the dimensions of this cube in case I want to know those things and that can be very important I could have options that I can collapse if I don't need them but again this shows options for your whole 3d viewport as well as the object that you have selected but generally I only bring that up if I need it the next window in this blender interface is this top bar and this is called the information panel or the information window and this has pretty much all the basic things you need to operate blender a file menu to open and save things to get your user preferences we'll talk about those in a few minutes and you can switch in this bar between different renderers now by default blender comes with its default blender render a render engine it's old render engine for drawing out every frame in a movie but in this video series we're going to be using the cycles render engine which is a new way of using or working with lights and materials and basically it is the way that blender calculates how light bounces how shadows look and how to work with things like materials and cameras within blender as far as it drawing up movies is concerned so that's the information window on the right side of screen we have two windows one up here and one down below this top window and as you can see I can drag the windows to make them you know taller or shorter or wider or narrower this is called the outliner window and this element I will shows me everything that's in my scene in a convenient list so right now my scene has three objects it has a cube it has a lamp and you can see the objects become highlighted in that list and we have a camera there's three icons next to every object there is a III con which hides that object from your viewport there is a little a cursor icon which means that if you make it unhighlight that that object can no longer be selected which can be handy and the camera icon stops that object from being rendered when you make a movie so if I uncheck the or the camera icon right there if I press the render button and we'll talk about this window in a sec that cube will not show up I'll press escape to go back and I'll click on that camera button again and click render again you'll see now that cube shows up when I render out my scene and again escape lets you go back so that's the outliner window it'll show you a nice list of everything in your scene the window below that is called the properties window and this has most of the tools that you'll be needing to use in most of the settings for your entire scene now at the top of this window we've talked about this at the top of every window is what's called a header bar you'll see that the 3d viewport has a header bar the outliner window is a header bar and every header bar has a column button and this is called the current editor type for this area button I basically called the window type button but this properties window has a bunch of other buttons or tabs for switching between different options for different things that you're working with in your scene the first tab is the camera tab or the render tab which has all the options for rendering out a movie like the dimensions of the movie that you're rendering out in this case by default it's 1920 by 1080 which is the normal size for 1080p TV and any of the sections in any of these tabs can be collapsed and they can even be reordered so let's say I want the dimensions section to be above the render section I can drag this little crosshatch to area up and reorganize them and collapse anything that I want but I'll leave it at its default these tabs are case sensitive which means that if I have different objects selected these tabs will change because different objects have different sorts of options available to them you'll notice that when I have a cube in other words I mesh selected I have options or tabs for materials and textures whereas if I have a camera selected some of those tabs disappear and I have a new tab for just the camera settings like what sort of lens I have on the camera how many blades that lens has you know what my field of view is and things like that if I had a lamp selected you'll see there's a new light or lamp tab in that laptop I can change things like the color temperature of my light or the brightness or intensity of the light and things like that all right so that's the properties window we don't know at the bottom of the screen is called the timeline and if ever done any animation on the computer you'll know the timeline is a timeline is basically a representation of time in frames over your whole animation at the bottom of this tab and of course is a header which displays the start and end frames which is the length how many frames you have to work with of course you can change any of these values so if you need a longer timeline longer than 250 frames which is little over 10 seconds at 24 frames per second we also have of course like VCR or DVD buttons with play a-and play reverse and go back to the beginning and go to the end and as a record button if you're doing animation you can click on this record button and it will start recording keyframes if you start moving or rotating or scaling things in your scene alright so how is blender users interface customizable well any of these windows are of course scalable but you can reorganize them and change their type and divide your whole screen up exactly the way that you want it butter by default comes with a bunch of different layouts depending on what task that you're performing at any time this is blenders default layout but if I go up to the top in the information panel I can just click on this little button here I can change to a different window layout and I'm working on a video game and yes blender has a game engine built in I might want to work in something like the game logic layout which changes the entire layout and has new window types in it that you can get to it any time but this is a good layout maybe if you're working on a game if I'm doing let's say you be editing which means texturing objects all I want to have different windows on my screen again and you can always go back to your default just by clicking on default now those are different window layouts and you saw those windows were different sizes but you can customize even your default layout or any layout you want to exactly you want and you can even create new layouts if you customize you know the layout of the windows exactly the way you want you can click on plus and you can create a new window layout for any time you come back to blender later on but let's talk about changing window types if I want to make you know this let's say I don't want this outliner window in the interface anymore but I could really use another 3d viewport which always displays from my camera what I could do is I could click on the button on its header which changes the window type and I can change this window to another 3d viewport and I can have a whole other 3d viewport here and I want this window to always look through the camera I can click on 0 or go to view and select camera and they'll let me see what my team looks like through my camera at all times if I want you know this window down here to be another 3d viewport or maybe I want you know this bottom window to be something entirely different I can change it to any other type of window that I want we'll talk about more window types in future videos but the next thing to talk about is adding or removing windows if I'm gonna have more than one 3d viewport in this area what I can do is I can grab this little triangular cross hatched area at the top of my screen and I can drag it either across left and right in the window or I can drag it down in the window and what that will do is divide my window up into more windows so what I'll do is I'll click and drag to the left and that made two independent 3d windows and again with any window I can change the window type if I really want I'll make this window narrower if I want this window over here to be just like this window a properties window I can do that by caching it to a properties window just like that then maybe I can get rid of this one I can make it into a 3d viewport window over here so you can go really go crazy with this and maybe you should just to get comfortable with it and I'll show you later on this video how to just reset blender to all the defaults or you can just quit blender and everything will come back the way it was let's go ahead and change us back to a properties window let's go ahead and change this window back to a 3d viewport so as you can see you can make as many 3d views as you want to if you want to you can eat me you'll make a four-way grid if you want you can drag down on that down into the window and then you can have one let's say from your front view and let's drag one down here and I'll make this one that's my front this is going to my side this is going to be my top and this is going to be just from from some perspective view there we go and now it looks something like other than 3d programs like Maya or 3ds Max if you want to join windows together what you can do is you can do the opposite you can drag this little cross hatched area into a neighboring window now a little proviso here you can only merge two windows that share and it after rectangle or a square as you can see I've got a different size windows in this side of the screen than this on this screen so you know this window and this window at door don't form a rectangle they're sort of a funny shape so I cannot merge these two together what I need to do if I want to make this into one big window again is merge these two together and then these two together and then I can merge the two half together again to merge two windows you can just do the opposite you can click on the little crosshatch area and drag it into the window next door and it'll merge those two windows together or if you click and drag and keep holding on you'll see that there's an arrow that shows up but you keep holding your mouse down and you keep any drag down you can decide which way you want the window to be dragged so if I really want to keep this right window here I don't care about this user per spinned oh I can just drag down and let go and it'll keep the right ortho view there are other ways too or there's another way to divide or join windows up if I right-click on the border between two windows it'll give me the option to either split area or join area so instead of using this little cross hatched area you can right click and say split area and you get a line and you can go across in fact you can go across any window and divide your window up that way likewise if you want to join these two areas together you can right click on the edge between them and click join area and choose which direction that you want to go I'm going to go ahead and drag that window over and now we have our kind of our basic layout again I'll change this window back into a outliner window but I just want to do this very quickly what I can do is I can go to file and new and we those startup file and it goes back to the way it was so those are Windows and customizing wheels within blender the next thing we'll do is we're going to customize blender so that it works better for you from now on the first thing we'll do though is I'm gonna make this one a little bit wider so that I can see all the tabs well I have a mesh selected and I'm going to change my blender render engine over to the new cycles around your engine so that now we may you know a movie and we make textures and lights everything will look a lot better or make our final animation production or any rendering of any scene let's go ahead and you know what I don't want a timeline in my default layout so I'm going to get rid of it I'm going to just click that little cross next area up and then keep holding and drag down and then I'll get rid of it and you know what I don't want a tool shelf at all because I can always just press T on yet but I don't use it that often let's go ahead and make this outline a little bit taller and I think that's all I'll do in the interface let's go up to our preferences so under the file menu our preferences and preferences are one of a few times where blender will actually launch a new window like that you can dry ground that has closed icons both of them on a Mac but all this should be the same on a Windows PC if actually I know that it is the Preferences window is broken up into tabs and under the first tab will sort of go through each tab one by one and we'll set things up so things work really great for you in the future one thing that you should definitely check it's not checked by default is this rotate around selection option if you have this checked what it will do is if you have an object selected and you orbit your scene it'll orbit your scene around that object so the object will always stay in the middle of your viewport which is really ideal if you're zoomed in and you don't have this option selected and you orbit that object go flying off of your scene because the scene will always orbit around the zero zero zero coordinate right in the middle of the world and not the object that you have selected so that's the one thing that I would change in here let's go over to the next tab in the editing tab the first thing I'll do is I'm going to a update number of undos that I have possible just like in Photoshop or any other program you have a limited number of control Z's that you can do to undo my default is 32 I'm going to turn it up to 64 which I believe is the maximum it might be different if you have a 64-bit version of blender or a 32-bit version of blender depending on what your operating system is but 64 is a better number anything else that I want to do in here I don't think so let's go on over to the input tab and definitely one thing you want to do here is you want to check emulate numpad I talked about this in the last video but what emulate numpad does is lets you use those one three and seven buttons but on your number row to change your views so in the last video I use one three and seven to learn my front side and top views but I have to use my number pad but if you a small keyboard like at the default Mac keyboard or a smaller laptop keyboard the number pad or the number row didn't work before well if you check this it will you'll be able to use your one three and seven and your five key to switch between orthographic and perspective the next option that you should definitely have turned on is turntable it is by default but the old default and the old versions of other was trackball the way you orbit the way the orbiting behaves in this window is much better in turntable you can experiment between those and see what I mean but definitely leave it on turntable if you're using a mouse that does not have a mouse wheel or a clickable mouse wheel you'll definitely want to click on emulate 3-button mouse I thought my mouse cursor over that you'll see what it says is emulate middle mouse with alt left Mouse so what this means is if you don't have a mouse wheel or using a trackpad you can hold down alt and then just left-click to orbit like you would with a mouse wheel button it'll be very handy for you this is also under the input tab where you can customize all of your keyboard shortcuts and if you're a three studio max person or a Maya person you're a little bit saved here by default all these keyboard shortcuts are set to the way they are in blender but you can change them using these 3ds Max and Maya presets in case you really just want to use all the presets that you already know but I recommend just leaving them at the blender settings by default so that you get used to the butter settings on other computers if you use blender on other computers is there anything else I want to have checked here now I'm on a Mac and I have my Mac set to the have the scroll Direction called natural and that's the way that it is by default on in other words scrolling up and down is the opposite on newer Macs so what I did is I want to be able to zoom in using my mouse wheel by scrolling up to zoom in and scrolling down to zoom out so I've checked this invert wheel now assume direction and that's fixed that so if you have a you know you if you a Mac you can play with that that's that is for I think that's everything that I want to talk about in this tab let's go ahead to the add-ons tab we're not going to talk about anything here but what I will say is that you know in most videos what I'll be doing is I'll be displaying to you what keys I'm pressing on my keyboard and what mouse buttons I'm pressing down on the bottom left of my 3d viewport and that is done with this add-on which is a third-party add-on it's in a 3d view section of this window or that's a three view option and it's called screencast key so I need to enable that and then I'll enable that later on my properties panel in my 3d viewport so it shows up in every video in fact I will check that and we'll move on themes is where you can change the color of anything in your entire blender interface if you want the background color instead of the dark gray in your 3d viewport to be bright pink you can do it you'll see different options for every single window you can literally change any single color in any part of the interface that you want but I'm not going to there are presets but again I'm not going to change that under the file tab but you can change the default paths in other words what folders you want to be default for things like where the fonts are on your computer if you're adding text to a scene you can change basically any of the paths I'm not gonna change anything here so we'll move on under the system tab is where you can change things like the text size on your screen you'll notice that my text in other words all the text and all the icons are bigger on my screen they are on yours because I've set my DPI adults per inch for icons and text to 94 by default it's 72 but I can leave mine at 94 you can play with those as you desire but let's move on I don't think there's anything else in here that I'm going to want to change so I'll leave it to save these user settings in this window what I can do is just click save user settings if I'm working with a seen this new this button is actually kind of new and nice if I'm working on something already and I want to change my preferences if I click this it's not going to set up you know it's not going to force blender to load with other things that I've done already in my scene so you can just click on save user settings and then close the window and the next time you launch blender those settings will be saved to make sure blender stays the way it is though in terms of what objects I have in my scene and exactly you know how zoomed in and out I am and exactly as you see it now I'm going to talk to file and save startup file and what that will do is it'll save all my preferences that I just set up and saved and my entire window layout and this is what you can also do this with control you and I'll click on OK yes I want to do that and now look the next time I launch blender you'll see file new reload setup file but I have no tool shelf I have no timeline and everything is exactly the way I left it and if I look at my preferences let's look at the rotate around selection yep that's still checked because I check that before we saved our settings if you ever mess up blender entirely in other words you do something you don't know what you did and blur doesn't behave the same as it did before you can always go to file and load factory settings oops file load factory settings and blender will go back the way it was and then you'll need to go to file and save startup file or control you to save those factory settings to your default settings again so weather is very easy to get back to the way it should be but we'll leave it like this that's it for this video please click on the like button below and you wanna see more videos from me go ahead and subscribe thank you for watching and I'll see you next time you

Channel: BornCG

Views: 148,268

Keywords: Blender, Blender 2.7, Blender Cycles, cycles, 3D, CG, CGI, animation, animate, interface, UI, user interface, Program, software, tutorial, lesson, how to, beginner, introduction, into, help, preferences, preference, Blender (Software), 3D Modeling (Film Job), cartoon, Tips, windows

Id: qlj_4nlJWpo

Length: 23min 54sec (1434 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 10 2014