Blender For Dummies. Jason van Gumster

Each workflow can be considered as a bundle of workspaces, with the workspace tabs along the top of the Blender window arranged in the basic order you would go through for that workflow from start to finish. Blender’s default behavior is to launch with the General workflow and put you in the Layout workspace, because layout is one of the first steps in a general 3D animation process.

      

In addition to clicking on a workspace tab to use it, you can cycle through workspace tabs by pressing Ctrl+Page Up and Ctrl+Page Down.

      

You can rename any workspace to any name you want by double-clicking its tab. The default workspace names work reasonably well for most situations, but as I work, I tend to customize a workspace to the point that I’m using it for something quite different from its original name. So in that case, I’ll often rename the workspace to better reflect what it is I’m doing. Get used to the idea of naming everything in your projects. Trust me, being in the habit of using a reasonable name makes life infinitely easier. It’s especially true when you come back to an old project and you need to figure out what everything is.

The workspace tabs at the top of the Blender window are arranged in an order that reflects the common steps in a workflow. However, that may not be the way you do things. Right-click any tab and Blender provides you with options to put the tab at the front or back of the list, duplicate it, or remove it altogether. As of this writing, you can’t reorder tabs by dragging and dropping, but hopefully that feature will come in future releases of Blender.

      Creating a new workspace

      To create a new workspace, left-click the plus tab at the end of the series of workspace tabs and choose the workspace that most closely matches the screen layout you want to work within. From here, you can make the changes to create your own custom workspace layout (like renaming it!). For example, you may want to create a 2D painting workspace or a multi-monitor workspace with a separate window for each of your monitors.

      

If you want Blender to always launch in a different workflow than the General one, you need to save a new startup file. This is basically a template file that Blender uses to store the preferred environment that you want to start in. For example, say your primary interest is 2D animation and you want Blender to always launch with the workspace tabs for that workflow; follow these steps:

      1 Start a new Blender session in the 2D Animation workflow by choosing File ⇒ New ⇒ 2D Animation.

      2 Choose File ⇒ Defaults ⇒ Save Startup File to set this workflow as your default work environment the first time you launch Blender.

      Customizing the Blender environment

      You can use this same method, outlined in the previous section, if you’ve fully customized your Blender environment to something completely different from any of the default workflows. When you use the Save Startup File feature, Blender saves your current settings, workspaces, and even 3D scenes to a special .blend file called startup.blend that gets loaded each time Blender starts. So any models you have in the 3D Viewport and any changes you make to other workspaces are saved, too. Fortunately, if you’ve made a mistake, you can always return to the default setup by choosing File ⇒ Load Factory Settings and re-create your custom layouts from there.

This behavior of saving a special startup.blend file is fine for setting up custom workspaces, but it has no influence on changes you make in Preferences (such as custom hotkeys or themes). Those kinds of changes are automatically stored separately when you make them. Your startup file doesn’t have any effect on changes made in Preferences (see the next section for more on configuring your preferences in Blender). This way, you can store custom workspaces without overwriting more important settings like keymaps and preferred add-ons.

      

When adjusting the layout of your workspaces, the menus and buttons in the header of an editor can be obscured or hidden if the area is too narrow. This scenario happens particularly often for people who work on computers with small monitors, but it can also sometimes happen on high resolution, or HiDPI, 2k and 4k screens. In this case, you can do three things:

        Right-click in the header area and toggle Header ⇒ Show Menus.The menus are collapsed into a single button with an icon consisting of three lines, sometimes called a hamburger menu. This frees up a little bit of space, but on smaller monitors, it may not be enough.

       Hover your mouse cursor over the header region and scroll your mouse wheel.If any parts of the header are obscured, you can scroll them in and out of view.

       Middle-click the header and drag your mouse left and right.The contents of the header move left and right so that you can bring those obscured buttons into view. I personally like this approach because it feels more direct.

      Setting user preferences

       This section on user preferences is by no means comprehensive. The number of options available in Blender’s Preferences editor is mind-bogglingly large. My intent here is to introduce you to the editor itself. Have a look on this book’s supplementary website (blenderbasics.com) for setting some of the most useful and relevant options in the Preferences editor. For specific details on every single button, see the online documentation available at https://docs.blender.org/manual.

Of course, the first question is, “Where exactly are the controls for user preferences?” Well, the Preferences editor is just like any other editor in Blender and can, therefore, appear in any area you want it to by using the Editor Type menu in the header region of any editor. (For more information, see the section “Looking at Editor Types,” earlier in this chapter.) Of course, you can also choose Edit ⇒ Preferences, and Blender creates a new window just for the Preferences editor. Although creating a separate window is a bit of a violation of Blenders non-overlapping philosophy, it is sometimes nicer because you don’t have to replace or split any of your existing areas to get a Preferences editor. Also, it’s unlikely that you’ll be modifying your preferences frequently while working on a Blender project, so the chances are low that this overlapping window will get in your way.

      

If you choose Edit ⇒ Preferences, and you don’t see a new window with the Preferences editor, your Blender window may be in a full-screen state and your operating system’s window manager may not be allowing the window with Preferences to sit atop that full-screen window. To get around this issue, toggle off the full-screen view by choosing Window ⇒ Toggle Window Fullscreen.

      

By default, Blender automatically saves any changes you make in the Preferences editor so they’ll persist to the next time you launch Blender. If you don’t want this auto-save behavior, click the button with the three-line icon (sometimes called a hamburger menu). You’ll get a menu that includes a toggle option for Auto-Save Preferences. Click that menu item to toggle it off. With auto-save disabled, you manually choose to save them as your