Blender For Dummies. Jason van Gumster

       If you’re making anything big with 3D computer graphics like a movie or a video game, you’re most likely going to be collaborating with other people. 3D computer graphics in general, and animation specifically, is an extremely collaborative art form. Otherwise, it would take forever to get anything completed. If you’re working with other people, it’s often useful to be able to pass notes to each other within the context of your work so you can give helpful feedback or let the next person in the pipeline know why you did something. In fact, this can even be useful if you’re working solo. I leave notes to myself all the time in my .blend files as reminders so I don’t have to mentally keep track of every random design decision I made while working.

Blender’s annotation feature gives you the ability to leave these kinds of notes in your .blend files, right in the editor you’re working in. The controls for annotations are at the bottom of the View tab of the Sidebar. Expand the Annotations panel and you should see a button labeled New. Click that button and the panel will expand to look like what’s shown in Figure 2-11.

      The list box can hold multiple layers of annotations. By default Blender pre-populates this list box with a single layer named Note. To the left of the layer is a color swatch that dictates the color of any annotations on that layer. Add and remove layers by using the plus and minus buttons to the right of the list box. Below the layer list box is a Thickness slider that controls the thickness of any annotations you make on that layer.

      The easiest way to make a new annotation is to use the Annotate tool in the Toolbar. Activate this tool by clicking and you’re instantly able to start writing and drawing in your 3D Viewport on your active annotation layer. If you hold down your mouse button while clicking the Annotate tool in the Toolbar, you also get options to draw lines, polygons, and erase.

      FIGURE 2-11: The Annotations panel in the View tab of the Sidebar is where you control how your annotations look in the 3D Viewport.

For faster access to annotating, you don’t have to use the Annotate tool. You can just hold down D while left-clicking and dragging your mouse cursor in the 3D Viewport. This action gives you quick access to Annotate’s draw tool and lets you add marks on whichever annotation layer you have active in the Sidebar.

      Technically, you can even animate your annotations (for giving feedback on animated work). You just need to scrub forward on the Timeline and make a new annotation mark. Your annotations will update on playback as you change to those frames. You can adjust the timing of your annotations from the Grease Pencil context of the Dope Sheet.

      

You can actually make quite detailed and intricate animations using annotations alone. However, if you’re going to try and do full-blown 2D or 2.5D animation, I suggest you use Blender’s Grease Pencil objects instead. They’re more powerful and way better-suited for the job. See Chapter 15 for more on animating with Grease Pencil.

      Don’t know how to do something? Hooray for fully integrated search!

       Blender has a search feature that’s fully integrated into Blender’s interface. If you’ve been working your way through this chapter, you’ve probably already used it when adding custom event maps.

The benefit here is that if you know the operation you want to perform, but don’t know where to go in Blender’s interface to access it, you can simply search for that operator and perform it immediately. How’s that for awesome?

      The fastest way to access Blender’s integrated search feature from any editor is to press F3. A blank menu with a search field at the top appears. From here, simply start typing the name of the operator you want, and Blender updates the menu with search results that match what you’ve typed. Furthermore, if a hotkey is associated with that operation, it shows up to the right of the operator name in the menu so that you can remember the hotkey in the future. As an example, open the search menu (F3) and type save. As you type, the menu updates with operations within Blender that relate to saving.

Using the integrated search feature is a great way to familiarize yourself with the way Blender works, even more so if you’re migrating from another program. In that case, you know the terminology for what you want to do; you just have to find out how Blender does it. Figure 2-12 shows Blender’s integrated search menu.

      FIGURE 2-12: Blender’s integrated search menu is a great way to get familiar with Blender’s operators.

Customizing Blender to Fit You

You can tweak Blender’s screen layout, known as a workspace, to virtually any configuration you can imagine. However, Blender’s customization features go much deeper than just readjusting the areas in a Blender window. With a little time and effort, you can completely overhaul Blender to be as comfortable of a work environment as possible. This ability to customize is especially useful for people who are migrating to Blender from other 3D graphics programs. I won’t say that you can make Blender behave exactly like any of these other programs, but sometimes little things like using the same keyboard shortcuts help make the transition smoother.

      

Although this section gives you the means to completely bend Blender’s interface to your will, bear in mind that unless otherwise specified, this book relies on the default settings that ship with Blender. Unless you can remember your customized behaviors, it may be more helpful to use Blender’s default settings (File ⇒ Defaults ⇒ Load Factory Settings).

      Using preset workspaces

      You can make a variety of workspaces depending on the sort of work you’re doing. By default, Blender comes with a variety of preset workspaces, broken up into five major categories: General, 2D Animation, Sculpting, VFX, and Video Editing. Each category has two or more workspaces to choose from, with a few workspaces available in multiple categories. To see all the categories and workspaces available, click on the plus (+) tab at the end of the series of workspace tabs at the top of your Blender window.

      

If you don’t see the plus tab, your screen resolution may be set such that all the tabs aren’t visible. Hover your mouse cursor over the tabs and scroll your mouse wheel to expose the tabs that have gotten obscured by other parts of Blender’s interface.

Once you click on the plus tab, you should be greeted with a menu like the one shown in Figure 2-13.

      The following sections give a quick breakdown of each workspace per category.

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