Release the hotkey to choose that menu item.
As pie menus are still optional, you can always go back and disable them if you decide that you don't like using them. However, if you decide to keep them enabled, I try to help you throughout the rest of the book. For any given menu or operator, if there's an option for using a pie menu, I make it a point to let you know the hotkey and location of the various pie menu items.
Chapter 2
Understanding How Blender Thinks
In This Chapter
▶ Familiarizing yourself with Blender's windows
▶ Adjusting Blender's interface to fit the way you work
▶ Working in three-dimensional space
▶ Using the regions in the 3D View
It's time to get intimate with Blender. No, I don't mean you need to start placing scented candles around your computer. I mean that this chapter's focus is a detailed introduction to Blender's interface and how you can start finding your way around in it. First of all, it's pretty important to have an understanding of the various types of editors that Blender has and how to access them. These editors are the gateways and tools for creating whatever you want.
With the knowledge of what you can do with these editors, the next thing is actually building those creations. To do so, you need to understand how to work in a virtual three-dimensional space, and specifically, you need to understand how Blender handles that space. I also cover these topics in this chapter.
Looking at Editor Types
In many ways, Blender isn't so much one program as it is a bunch of different programs sharing the same interface and access to the same data. Thinking of it this way, each of Blender's editor types is kind of its own little program in a Blender area.
A Blender area can contain any editor type. You can see what editor types are available by left-clicking the button on the far left of that editor's header. Figure 2-1 shows the menu that appears when you press this button.
Figure 2-1: The Editor Type menu.
Each editor type serves a specific purpose, but you can organize them into four basic categories: animation editors, 2D editors, general editors, and miscellaneous editors. The menu shown in Figure 2-1 attempts to organize the editors according to these categories. The exception to this is the 3D View. Technically, it should probably be among the general editors, but since it's used most frequently, it has a distinguished position as the first option in the list.
Menus in Blender
You may have noticed that I refer to the 3D View as the “first” item in the Editor Type menu, even though in Figure 2-1, it's at the bottom of the menu. This is due to a somewhat unique quirk of Blender's menus. They're designed to help you by keeping the distance you need to move your mouse cursor as short as possible. In practice, this means that when you open a menu from an editor's header near the bottom of the Blender window, it flows upward with the first menu item at the bottom, closest to your mouse cursor. When you open a header menu near the top of the Blender window, it flows downward and the first item is at the top.
For floating menus like the Add (Shift+A) menu in the 3D View (covered in Chapter 4), the behavior is a little bit different. Those menus always list the first item at the top; however, Blender remembers the last item you picked in any of these floating menus and automatically places that item under your mouse cursor. Again, this is for speedy workflow. The idea is that if you chose one menu item last time, it's likely that you want to pick it again this time. To reduce the distance you have to move the mouse cursor, Blender facilitates this notion by jumping directly to the last menu item you chose.
The following subsections give you an overview of each editor, organized by category.
The editors covered in this section are usually the most common way of interfacing with objects in your 3D scene, as well as customizing Blender itself.
These editors give you general control over your scene or over Blender itself:
✔ 3D View (Shift+F5): Arguably the most-used editor in Blender, the 3D View shows you the three-dimensional view of your model or scene and provides access to many of the tools you can use to modify it.
✔ Properties (Shift+F7): You can manipulate nearly all of the different attributes for your scene and the objects within it via this editor. You can find out more about this topic later in this chapter in the section, "Understanding the Properties editor."
✔ Outliner (Shift+F9): The Outliner gives a hierarchical view of all the objects in your scene along with the ability to see how they’re related to one another. It's also a quick way to select objects and do simple manipulations in a complex scene.
✔ User Preferences: Through the User Preferences editor, you can customize how you interact with Blender.
✔ Info: The Info editor contains Blender's main menu and displays basic information about your scene. It also serves as a report space where warnings and errors are logged. This can be used to figure out what happened if a feature doesn't work as expected.
The following editors relate specifically to animation:
✔ Timeline: If you're working on an animation, the Timeline editor offers you a convenient way to quickly jump from one moment in your animation to another as well as play back the animation.
✔ Graph Editor (Shift+F6): Blender's Graph Editor shows a graphical representation of animatable attributes in your scene as they change over time.
✔ Dope Sheet (Shift+F12): The Dope Sheet is where you create and adjust your overall animation using actions or keying sets. You can use actions to animate all of a character's movement in a scene, or you can mix them together in the NLA Editor. Keying sets give you the ability to group together a bunch of different animatable attributes.
✔ NLA Editor: NLA stands for nonlinear animation. This editor allows you to mix pre-animated actions on a single character (such as mixing a waving hand animation with a walking animation to have your character walk and wave her hand at the same time).
The following editors manipulate specific kinds of two-dimensional data:
✔ UV/Image Editor (Shift+F10): With the UV/Image Editor, you can do basic image editing as well as edit the texture coordinates for your models (see Chapter 7).
✔ Video Sequence Editor (Shift+F8): Blender's Video Sequence Editor (VSE) is a lightweight video editor. The VSE isn't as powerful as some other programs created specifically for editing video, but it's quite effective for stringing a sequence of scenes together and doing basic effects, overlays, and transitions.
