Okay, welcome to chapter two in this chapter,
I want to show you a few different things that
you can do to customize blender to fit your workflow.
Since you already are familiar with other applications
or are likely familiar with other applications,
there's a very good chance you already have a preferred interface layout,
some preferred hot keys.
And by customizing some things in blender it will allow you to get up to speed faster.
So the first thing I'm going to show you is how to customize the blender interface.
So luckily blenders interface is very, very customizable. We can use any layout.
We wish we can switch between
quad view and regular view or any other number of things.
So the first thing to understand is windows inside blender
windows not in the normal sense of a different window,
there's no floating windows in blender
but window types and blender are every single one of these panels.
Every single one of these panels including the view port, the outline, er,
the properties panel and the timeline and even the top header bar right here.
Each one of these are different window types
and you can change the window type of any active
you by using the icon in the bottom left corner.
So if you choose this icon here,
you'll notice that we then have all of our different
editor or window types that we wish to choose from.
So if we wanted to switch the three d view
port over to the graph editor for our animation curves,
we can simply change that.
Or if we want to change our timeline over to the dope sheet we can change that.
And so any one of these can be changed to any view that we wish
if you want to add multiple views.
So let's say if we want to do a dual view port layout here or maybe one side,
we want an image editor and the other side we want the view port,
there's two different ways you can do that.
One is to use the split handles that you'll find at the bottom left,
right here and top right of every single window.
If you just hover your mouse over these
and then left click and drag in the direction that you wish to split.
So in this case if I want to split this view here and I use the top right handle,
I can just left click and drag and drop across there and it will split that view,
duplicating whichever region that I currently used.
So now I have two separate view ports.
Each one of these are independent but of course show the exact same content.
If I then change this view over the UV image editor,
I then have two different views that again I can use for different purposes.
The other way to split views.
Let's just assume for a moment that I wanted to get a graph editor in here is to
hover your mouse over the dividing bar between those
views until you have the Dublin and arrow.
And then you can simply right click and choose split area or joint area.
So if I choose split area, I'll get a new line
and allows me to move it where I wish before splitting.
If you wish to change the orientation, just middle click
and it will change the direction of the split.
When you're ready to split, just left click and you now have two views again again,
which you can then change the type
if you want to merge these back together. So if I want to just get back to one view,
I can either use the handles here again or by right clicking.
So if I wanted to use the handles,
the way that you do it is you drag towards the window that you want to merge into.
So if I want to merge into this view I'm going to click and
drag here left click up and I'll get an overlay arrow at this point.
I could actually reverse the direction but I'll just go
ahead and confirm over that and I just release my mouse
and it will merge those two together.
The other way to do it is by right clicking with the double headed arrow by right
click and choose joint area and then you can choose which one you want to merge over.
So I'll just merge over here giving me back to my three D view.
Now once you're done customizing this, you want to go ahead and save your defaults.
The way that you can do this is by going up to file and save user settings.
The one thing to be aware of at this point in blender 2.63.
Now, I'm actually using a release candidate since this will be available very soon,
But in Blender 2.63,
any scene that you currently have up will also be saved in your default settings.
So if you had an active scene that you're working on here and you go to file,
save user settings, that scene will then become your default file.
That will be loaded anytime you create a new file or open blender.
So any time you change these things or to set your defaults,
you're going to want to load up a default scene first
and then change your settings and save your user settings.