Blender For Dummies. Jason van Gumster

easier to remember.

      As humans, we tend to naturally think about things spatially. It's much easier to remember that a thing is up or left or right than to remember that it's the sixth item in a list of things. Because the menu items are arranged in two-dimensional space, pie menus take advantage of our natural way of recalling information. Also helpful for memory is the fact that any given pie menu can only have as many as eight options.

      ✔ Selecting menu items is a gestural behavior.

      A gestural interface relies on using mouse movement to issue a command. Pie menus are not purely gestural, but by arranging the menu items spatially, you get many of the same advantages provided by gestures. Most valuable among these advantages is the reliance on muscle memory. After working with a pie menu for an extended period of time, selecting menu items becomes nearly as fast as using hotkeys, and for essentially the same reasons. You're no longer thinking about the direction you're moving your mouse cursor (or which key you're pressing). You've trained your hands to move in a specific way when you want to perform that task. Once you get to that point (it doesn't take very long), you'll find that you're working very quickly.

       Before you get too excited about pie menus, they have a couple of limitations:

      ✔ Pie menus are basically limited to a maximum of eight menu items. (It's possible to have more items, but if a pie menu has more than eight items, it becomes cluttered and the speed and memory advantages of pie menus are lessened.) Blender has a number of menus that are very long; therefore, they don't translate nicely to the pie menu model. This means that some menus will be pies and others will not. Hopefully, as development continues on Blender, these menus will migrate to being more pie-like.

      ✔ Pie menus, as of this writing, aren't enabled by default. As Blender development progresses, the plan is that pie menus will eventually be enabled as a default option. For the time being, however, you need to manually enable them. As that's the direction that Blender is currently heading (and Blender development is fast; there's a new release nearly every two months), I recommend that you go ahead and enable pie menus so you can get comfortable with them early.

      The process of enabling pie menus is easy:

      1. Open User Preferences (File ⇒ User Preferences or Ctrl+Alt+U) and go to the Add-ons section.

      2. On the category list on the left side of the window, choose the User Interface category (you may need to scroll down to see it).

      The Pie Menus Official add-on should appear on the list to the right (as of this writing, this add-on is the only one in the User Interface category, so you may need to scroll back up to see it).

      3. Enable the Pie Menus Official add-on by left-clicking its checkbox on the far right.

      4. Pie menus are now enabled. Left-click the Save User Settings button at the bottom left of the User Preferences window.

      That's it! Pie menus will be automatically enabled each time you start Blender. (Read more about Blender add-ons in Chapter 2.)

To try out pie menus, first close the User Preferences window. With your mouse cursor in the 3D View, press Q to show the View pie menu. You should see a menu like the one in Figure 1-8.

       Figure 1-8: Your first pie [menu]!

      With the menu still visible, move your mouse cursor around the screen. Notice that the highlighted area of the circular slice indicator at the center of the menu points to your mouse cursor. Also notice that as you move your mouse cursor, individual menu items highlight when you enter their slice of the menu. This highlighting is how you know which menu item is currently ready to be picked. Press Esc to close the menu without selecting anything.

      There are two ways to choose menu items in a pie menu:

      ✔ Press, release, click: This can be considered the standard method:

      1. Press and release the hotkey that activates the menu.

      In this example, press and release Q.

      2. Move your mouse cursor to your desired menu item's slice.

      3. Choose that menu item by clicking anywhere within its slice.

      The current active slice is indicated by the circular slice indicator at the center of the menu, as well as the highlighting of each menu item as your mouse cursor enters its slice.

      ✔ Press, hold, release: I think of this method as the fast way.

      1. Press and hold the hotkey that activates the menu.

      In this example, press and hold Q.

      2. Move your mouse cursor to your desired menu item's slice.

      3. 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