Blender provides a lot of information with its interface and can be flexible enough to fit the workflow you need. Let's go over some of the basics on how to interpret and interact with Blender's UI. Before we begin, I want to point out that there is a very handy display at the very bottom of the user interface. This is an informative display that lets you know what each click can do in the context your cursor is at the moment. It also applies to when certain hotkeys are being held down to change the function of certain clicks. For example, if you hold Shift, you can see the information at the bottom changing. It tells us that without holding Shift, your middle mouse button rotates your perspective, but holding Shift pans your perspective. Feel free to refer to this display at any time while watching this series or playing around with Blender to learn more of its features. As a quick reference, here are what some of the mouse icons translate to. Now, the next big thing you'll notice is that each important section of the UI is separated into panels. These panels are scalable if you click and drag any of the boundaries, and they can also be whatever you'd like them to be. Simply click the drop down menu in the top-left or bottom-left of a panel and select a different type of editor. You can also create more panels by right-clicking a boundary, clicking split area, and then left clicking at a position of the screen you desire. To delete a panel, simply right-click a boundary, click Join Area and left-click over the panel you'd like to overwrite. Additionally, if you would ever like to maximize a panel to focus on it, simply mouse over an area and press Ctrl-Space You can also press Ctrl-Space again to return. While this is extremely powerful, Blender also provides default workspaces you can choose from that set up the appropriate editors for specific workflows. You can find these workspace options in the tabs above. For hotkey users, you can press Ctrl-PageUp or Ctrl-PageDown We will be going over each of these workspaces in future videos. However, for this video, we will focus on the primary editors of the layout workspace. Further introduction of other editors will be given in editor-specific videos. So, let's begin. If you saw our Viewport Navigation video, then you already know what the viewport is. This is where our 3D scene is displayed. In this editor, you can perform a variety of tasks that interact with your 3D scene and its objects. However, it's important to note that there are two helpful quick menus in the viewport. Simply press T (as in "tools") or left-click this arrow here to expand the quick tools menu for the viewport. This includes tools such as the Select Box, Move, Rotate and Scale. For hotkey users, keep in mind you can also use Shift-Space at any time to bring up the same Tools menu but labeled, and at your cursor location. This works similarly to a pie menu in that you have the option to hold the Shift-Space hotkey, move your cursor to the tool you want and release the hotkey to select a tool. You can also press N (as in "number") or left-click the arrow on the right to open additional quick settings, which include your item's transformation data, tool specific settings and other viewport options. You'll notice here there is an option for the 3D cursor, and this is a very powerful tool which you can see right here. This red-and-white circle acts as the spawning point for any new objects and can be used as a reference for pivoting, which we'll go over in another video. To place it around your scene simply hold Shift and right-click To recenter the cursor simply press Shift-S and select Cursor to World Origin from the pie menu or adjust the location and rotation settings in the right-hand side quick menu. Now, this feels like a good time to explain what pie menus are for those who are unfamiliar. Pie menus are quick wheel menus that appear around your cursor after a hotkey is pressed. You have three options when navigating a pie menu. The first option is to right-click to cancel in case you changed your mind. The second option is to press and hold the hotkey to initiate the pie menu, drag your cursor to your desired choice, then let go of the hotkey to select, with no clicking necessary. Or, the third option is to let go of the hotkey that initiated the pie menu before moving your cursor. Then use your cursor to left-click select the option you like. After you get used to where each option is, this can greatly speed up your workflow while also making several options available with less keystrokes. Throughout the series, you will see pie menus quite often for various different contexts. Now, below the viewport we have the Timeline. This controls playback of your animation. You can zoom in and out with your scroll wheel, drag the timeline with your middle mouse button, change the start and end frames for your output, and create and manipulate keyframes. All of which we'll go over in another video. The Properties Editor contains several tabs vertically to display the properties of your scene, your current tool, and whatever object you have selected. To start at the top, this first tab represents the options your currently selected tool in the viewport may have. In this case, the Select Box tool gives you a few different selection options. The next few tabs which you can see are separated by a small gap, contain your scene specific properties. Just to clarify, your scene refers to your entire 3D scene. However, you can create more than one scene in a single Blender file by clicking up here. You can also select a scene from existing scenes using this drop-down. This back-facing camera icon is your Render tab. This allows you to change render engines, sampling, engine specific properties and other properties that affect your final image and how it's interpreted from the 3D scene. The next icon looks like a printer, and this is your Output tab. This is where all of your output settings can be tweaked before render. Resolution, frame rate, file path, file type, and much more. The icon that looks like a stack of photos is the View Layer tab and is similar to what used to be called Render Layers. View layers are typically used to separate background and character passes. For example, for easy compositing after render. However, you'll notice this is only the Pass properties, not the Objects, and is for only one view layer, the one we're currently in. To select a different view layer to change its properties, you'll need to go up here, similar to creating a new scene. You can create and select existing view layers here. While we're on the topic, I'd like to point out what this panel above properties is for. In order to specify which collections of objects are rendered out in each view layer, you can check and uncheck collections here in what's called the Outliner. I highly recommend using descriptive names for your collections and view layers by double-clicking them, but we will go over this in another video. Next, we have the General Scene tab. This has other miscellaneous scene properties that affect your scene, such as your active camera, your units, and rigid body settings. Finally, the globe icon is the final tab of this section and is called the World tab. This includes properties for the sky and air of your scene. In other words, the surface option for your world is the shader used for your sky or background color, while Volume allows for volumetric lighting throughout the atmosphere of your scene as a whole, such as fog or mist. For the next section, the property tabs will be specific to the active object you have selected. So in this case, I will select the cube. Our first tab is the Object tab. This contains basic information such as Location, Rotation, and Scale of the object. You can also specify parent-child relationships, which collections it belongs to, and visibility of the object. The next tab is a very important tab for Blender. Represented by a wrench icon, the Modifiers tab allows for powerful manipulation of objects using predefined modifiers. Simply select a modifier from the drop-down menu to add it to the stack below. You can use as many modifiers as you like, and change the order or application of these modifications using these arrows. For example, the Subdivision Surface modifier and the Bevel modifier. This next tab is the Particles tab. You can see the icon looks like an object shooting particles out from its main body. In here, you can create particle systems and add them to the object you have selected. Next is the Physics tab which looks like an orbiting planet icon. This contains several different types of physics simulations and physics manipulators including cloth, rigid body, smoke, fluid, collision, and force fields, such as wind. The next icon looks like two objects wrapped together. This represents the Constraints tab. This tab is very similar to the Modifiers tab but deals more so with relationships of the objects you have selected with other objects or values, rather than manipulating the object by itself. You can have an object copy the location of another object with the Copy Location constraint, stay above the ground with the Floor constraint, or point at another object with the Tracking constraints. The green triangle icon is for your Object's Mesh Data. To explain what mesh data is, I can tell you that the reason why our cube is a cube is because of the mesh data. If I were to take this exact same object and change the mesh data, its shape would not be the same but its object properties, such as its location, would remain the same. Here, you can manipulate your Vertex Groups, also known as Weight Maps, your Shape Keys, also known as Blend Shapes, and your UV maps. Other geometry-specific settings belong here as well. And finally, we have our Material tab. This is represented by a material sphere icon, and is where you control much of how your object is shaded during render. The material you choose here will affect how shiny your object is, what color it is, and how rough it may appear to be. The final tab is actually in a different section, as you can see. There's a small gap there. This is the Texture tab, represented with a checkered canvas icon, and is not object specific. Textures exist as separate entities that can be referenced for a number of things including the World (AKA skybox), materials or brushes. Because of this ubiquity, they are in a separate section. Before we move on, let's go ahead and left-click to select our Lamp object. This is the dotted circular thing you see next to our cube. Once you have that selected, you'll have access to its Lamp Properties, which looks like a light bulb. This is where you can tweak its brightness, the radius of lights, whether or not it casts shadows, and what type of lamp it is. We can also left-click to select our camera object, which is this sideways rectangular pyramid shape we have here. Now you should have access to the Camera options which include focal length, perspective type, and much more. And that's the summary for the default layout workspace we see when we open Blender. I hope this is helpful for you and I'll be going into more detail about the other workspaces and what each editor does in separate videos.
