as Quad View, where the 3D Viewport is split into four regions: top, front, and right orthographic views, along with a user perspective view. You can create a layout similar to this through the somewhat arduous task of manually splitting areas and then setting up each area as a 3D Viewport from each of those perspectives. However, with no clear way to lock those views in place, you could very easily change one of your orthographic views to user perspective on accident. Fortunately, there’s a better way. Go to the 3D Viewport’s header and choose View ⇒ Area ⇒ Toggle Quad View or use the hotkey Ctrl+Alt+Q, and your 3D Viewport will switch to look like the one in Figure 2-9.
FIGURE 2-9: Using the Ctrl+Alt+Q hotkey, you can quickly switch between Blender’s regular viewport and a Quad View viewport like some other 3D programs have.
Regions
In Chapter 1, I briefly describe regions as areas in an editor that give you additional tools specific to that editor. In fact, you’ve already had exposure to a couple types of region in this chapter: the header, the Toolbar, and the Sidebar. This section focuses on the latter two in more detail.
Flanking either side of the 3D Viewport is a Toolbar on the left, and on the right is a region for modifying the properties of the 3D Viewport, referred to as the Sidebar.
The Sidebar
You can toggle the visibility of the Sidebar by choosing View ⇒ Sidebar in the header or by pressing N (for iNformation) while your mouse cursor is in the 3D Viewport. In fact, quite a few editors in Blender have a Sidebar. And with the exception of the Text Editor, which uses Ctrl+F (because it would be annoying if the Sidebar popped up every time you typed an N in the Text Editor), you can consistently open all of them by using the N hotkey.
In the 3D Viewport, the Sidebar serves three primary purposes, each designated by a specific tab:
Item: From the Item tab, you can directly modify your selected object by typing in explicit location, rotation, and scale values within the Transform panel.
Tool: The Tool tab has much the same content you would see in the Active Tool context of the Sidebar. This tab is particularly useful if you’re working with a maximized 3D Viewport (Shift+Spacebar). I tend to use it a lot when sculpting and painting.
View: The View tab is dedicated to customizing your 3D Viewport. From here, you can control features like the viewport camera (which is different from the scene camera), the location and orientation of the 3D cursor, and the collections that are visible in the 3D Viewport. Chapter 4 has more on working with collections. The View tab is also where you can control annotations in the 3D Viewport. There’s more on annotations later in this chapter.
The Toolbar
The Toolbar is a new feature in Blender, as of version 2.80. It allows you to have a workflow similar to other computer graphics applications where you first select a tool and then use that tool to act on an object or selection. Depending on what mode you’re in (Edit mode, Object mode, Sculpt mode, and so on), you will have a whole bunch of tools or only a handful.
Tool Settings
The controls in the Topbar are really handy, but they’re also available in the Sidebar as well as the Active Tool tab of the Properties editor. Personally, I tend to hide the Topbar to save screen space, but if you’re used to programs like Photoshop or Krita, you may find the Topbar more familiar.
The Last Operator panel
There’s an additional quasi-region in the 3D Viewport that’s extremely useful. At the bottom left of the 3D Viewport is the Last Operator panel. If you’ve just opened Blender, you won’t see this panel at all (because you haven’t done anything yet). However, if you perform an action in Blender — also known as an operator — like moving your selected object or adding a new object, this panel updates to display values relevant to that operator. Using this panel, you can perform a quick, rough operation and then tweak it to be more precise. For example, if you add a UV Sphere to your scene (Add ⇒ Mesh ⇒ UV Sphere), Blender adds a UV Sphere object to your scene at the location of the 3D cursor with 32 segments and 16 rings. Using the Last Operator panel, you can not only adjust the location of your new sphere, but you can also modify the number of segments and rings it has. You can see more on how the Last Operator panel is used in Chapter 5.
FIGURE 2-10: You can open a floating Last Operator panel by pressing F9.
Collaborating
