I’ve written a tutorial previously on setting up Blender’s UI, so if I miss something here, it may be in the other one.

Panels

So you start up Blender and it looks something like this. Now if we want to change some of the settings for Blender, get it working the way we want, the first hurdle is finding the settings area.

To find your settings and preferences, just grab the border below the menu at the top and pull it down! I find the most important default setting to change for my own usage is switching the ‘View rotation’ from trackball to turntable. Also, I have ‘Auto perspective’ enabled. This makes it automatically switch between orthographic display when you’re in side/top/top view, or perspective display when you’re in camera or user view modes. Of course, this is just the settings that I feel comfortable with, but at least now you know where to find them!

Blender’s entire user interface works off the concept of panels that can be turned to any purpose. If you click the little grid icon down the bottom left of the 3D view, you’ll find a pull down menu of all the different panel types.

As an alternative to grabbing the top panel and pulling it down to find the preferences, you can also change the main panel into a preferences panel! We’ll leave it as the 3d view for now though.

You can also create new panels by right-clicking on the border between two panels and splitting the area. You can reverse this by clicking the border between two panels and joining areas.

Once you’ve got the workspace set up how you want it, go to File -> Save Default Settings. You’ll need to do this, because Blender doesn’t remember your preferences if you don’t.

Next up:

Something more interesting! Actually making a 3d model! Golly gosh!

Filed under: 3d, blender, software, tutorials by isaac on Dec 07, 20:00