and so on).Set the event with the action you want assigned to it. For example, if you’re changing a hotkey, simply enter the key combination you want to use. If you decide that you don’t want to change the event, just click anywhere outside of the Event Type field.
You can also use this interface to activate and deactivate events, delete events, and restore them to their initial values. Furthermore, if you expand the event’s details by left-clicking the triangle to the left of the operation name, you have even more advanced controls.
Customizing the event system can be a pretty involved topic, so if you’re really interested in making extensive changes, it’s to your benefit to play with the event system editor in the Keymap section of Preferences a lot and make heavy use of the Restore buttons so that you can get Blender back to its defaults if something messes up.
After you have your events customized, you can save them to an external file that you can share with other users or simply carry with you on a USB drive so that your customized version of Blender is available wherever you go. To do so, click the Export button at the top right of the Preferences editor. A File Browser opens, and you can pick where you want to save your configuration file. The configuration is saved as a Python script. To load your custom configuration, it’s possible to load your script in Blender and just run it. However, simply using the Import button at the top of the Preferences editor is much easier.
Speeding up your workflow with Quick Favorites
As you work more and more with Blender, you may find that there are certain operators that you use frequently. However, perhaps you don’t want to go through the hassle of finding a free hotkey to use as a custom event. Well, dear artist, Blender has a special feature just for you: the Quick Favorites menu. The Quick Favorites menu is your own custom menu that you can populate with the tasks you perform most frequently in Blender.
To access the Quick Favorites menu, press Q. By default, you get an empty menu that tells you that there are no menu items found. Of course, you’re certainly going to want to start adding things to this menu. The process for adding menu items to Quick Favorites is much like creating a custom keymap:
1 Use Blender’s menus to navigate to the operator you want to add to the Quick Favorites menu.
2 Right-click the menu item you want to add and choose Add to Quick Favorites.
And there you go! In just two steps, you’ve just added an operator to your Quick Favorites menu. If you ever want to remove an item from your Quick Favorites menu, just call up Quick Favorites (Q), right-click the menu item in question, and choose Remove from Quick Favorites.
Chapter 3
Getting Your Hands Dirty Working in Blender
IN THIS CHAPTER
Blender is built for speed, and its design heavily emphasizes working as quickly and efficiently as possible for extended periods of time. On more than one occasion, I’ve found myself working in Blender for 10 to 15 hours straight (or longer). Although, admittedly, part of this ridiculous scheduling has to do with my own minor lunacy, the fact that I’m able to be that productive for that long is a testament to Blender’s design. This chapter gets you started in taking full advantage of that power. I cover the meat and potatoes of interacting with three-dimensional (3D) space in Blender, such as moving objects and editing polygons.
If you’ve worked in other 3D programs, chances are good that a number of Blender concepts may seem particularly alien to you. Although this divide is reduced with each update, to quote Yoda, “You must unlearn what you have learned” in your journey to become a Blender Jedi. If you’ve never worked in 3D, you may actually have a slight advantage over a trained professional who’s used to a different workflow. Hooray for starting fresh!
Grabbing, Scaling, and Rotating
The three most basic ways of changing an object in a 3D scene are called transformations by mathematicians. In Blender, the terms are a little bit more straightforward:
Change location using translation.
Change size using scale.
Change rotation using orientation.
Rather than use the mathematical terms of translation, scale, and orientation, most Blenderheads use the terms grab, scale, and rotate, respectively. Other programs might use the term move in place of grab or size in place of scale. Whatever you call them, and whatever program you use, these three operations place any object in 3D space at any arbitrary size and with any arbitrary orientation.
Differentiating Between Coordinate Systems
Before you bound headlong into applying transformations to your objects, you need to understand how coordinate systems work in 3D space. All coordinate systems in Blender are based on a grid consisting of three axes:
The X-axis typically represents side-to-side movement.
The Y-axis represents front-to-back movement.
The Z-axis goes from top to bottom.
This grid system with axes is referred to as the Cartesian grid. The origin, or center, of this grid is at the (0,0,0) coordinate. The difference in the coordinate systems within Blender lies in the way this grid is oriented relative to a selected 3D object. Figure 3-1 shows the Transform Orientations menu in the 3D Viewport header when you left-click it as well as the corresponding pie menu that you can see by pressing
