button with an icon consisting of 3 lines. 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.
✔ For a somewhat more direct method, Blender has another trick up its sleeve: 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.
This section on user preferences is by no means comprehensive. The number of options available in Blender's User Preferences editor is mind-bogglingly large. My intent here is to introduce you to the most helpful and relevant options to get you working effectively. For specific details on every single button, see the online documentation available at www.blender.org/manual.
Of course, the first question is, “Where exactly are the buttons for user preferences?” Well, the User 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 go to File⇒User Preferences (Ctrl+Alt+U), and Blender creates a new window just for the User 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 User Preferences editor.
Interface
The first set of available options in Blender's User Preferences (shown in Figure 2-3) relate to how you interact with your scene within the 3D View. Moving from left to right, here are some of the more useful options:
✔ Display: The options in this column toggle the display of various informational elements in the 3D View, such as tooltips, object information, and the small mini axis in the bottom left corner.
✔ View Manipulation: The options in this column give you control over how you interact with the environment in the 3D View.
● Auto Depth and Zoom To Mouse Position: If you tend to create large environment scenes, having these two options enabled is often useful so that you can quickly navigate your way through your scene without becoming stuck.
● Smooth View: Smooth View is probably one of the coolest convenience options added to Blender in recent history and as such, it deserves explicit mention here. By default, Smooth View is set to a value of 200. If you go to your 3D View and choose View⇒Camera (Numpad 0), the 3D View smoothly animates the change from the default perspective view to the Camera's perspective. Pretty slick, huh? The values in Smooth View are in milliseconds, with a maximum value of 1,000, or 1 second (although that's a bit slow for most tastes). The default value of 200 works nicely, but play with it on your own and see what works best for you.
✔ Manipulator: The 3D manipulator is the large colored axis at the center of the cube in Blender's default scene. Its main purpose is to move, rotate, or scale your selection in the 3D View. Chapter 3 goes into more detail on how to use the manipulator. The settings here control whether or not the manipulator is enabled by default, as well as its size when visible.
● Menus: Some users prefer to have menus immediately pop open when they run their mouse cursor over them. The options under this heading facilitate that preference. It's disabled by default, but you can enable the Open On Mouse Over check box and then use the values below that to adjust the delay, or how long your mouse has to be over a menu's name before it pops up.
● Pie Menus: Pie menus are an optional menu type in Blender that I cover at the end of Chapter 1. The settings here offer a little control over how the pie menus appear, and for how long.
Figure 2-3: The Interface options in User Preferences.
Editing
The next set of options is related to the act of editing objects. As shown in Figure 2-4, the most relevant options are as follows:
✔ Undo: The options related to undo are pretty important. Here you can adjust how many steps of undo you have when working in Blender (default is 32), as well as toggle Global Undo on and off. Now, you may be wondering why in the world anyone would ever want to disable the ability to undo a mistake. The most common answer to this question is performance. Having undo enabled requires more memory from your computer, and each level of undo requires a little bit more. Sometimes, when working with very complex scenes or models, an artist might disable undo to dedicate all the computer's memory to the current scene rather than the steps used to create it. This decision occurs most when artists work with Blender's sculpting tools (see Chapter 5).
✔ Playback: When animating, there are times when you need to start animating before the first frame, such as starting the scene with a character, object, or simulation already in motion. By default, however, Blender doesn't allow you to work in the Timeline (or any other editor) on frame numbers less than zero. But if you enable the Allow Negative Frames check box, that limitation is removed.
✔ Transform: If you're migrating to Blender from another 3D suite, or if your primary pointing device is a pressure-sensitive drawing tablet, you may find it difficult to use Blender's “click to confirm” default behavior when grabbing, scaling, or rotating your selections. If you enable the Release Confirms check box, you may feel more comfortable.
Figure 2-4: The Editing options in User Preferences.
Input
The settings and controls in the Input options of the User Preferences editor have the greatest influence over how you interact with Blender. As Figure 2-5 shows, this section is extensive.
Figure 2-5: The Input options in User Preferences.
The largest part of this section – the event editor on the right side – is actually covered
