Blender For Dummies. Jason van Gumster

the values below that to adjust the delay, or how long your mouse has to be over a menu's name before it pops up.

      ● Pie Menus: Pie menus are an optional menu type in Blender that I cover at the end of Chapter 1. The settings here offer a little control over how the pie menus appear, and for how long.

       Figure 2-3: The Interface options in User Preferences.

       Editing

The next set of options is related to the act of editing objects. As shown in Figure 2-4, the most relevant options are as follows:

      ✔ Undo: The options related to undo are pretty important. Here you can adjust how many steps of undo you have when working in Blender (default is 32), as well as toggle Global Undo on and off. Now, you may be wondering why in the world anyone would ever want to disable the ability to undo a mistake. The most common answer to this question is performance. Having undo enabled requires more memory from your computer, and each level of undo requires a little bit more. Sometimes, when working with very complex scenes or models, an artist might disable undo to dedicate all the computer's memory to the current scene rather than the steps used to create it. This decision occurs most when artists work with Blender's sculpting tools (see Chapter 5).

      ✔ Playback: When animating, there are times when you need to start animating before the first frame, such as starting the scene with a character, object, or simulation already in motion. By default, however, Blender doesn't allow you to work in the Timeline (or any other editor) on frame numbers less than zero. But if you enable the Allow Negative Frames check box, that limitation is removed.

      ✔ Transform: If you're migrating to Blender from another 3D suite, or if your primary pointing device is a pressure-sensitive drawing tablet, you may find it difficult to use Blender's “click to confirm” default behavior when grabbing, scaling, or rotating your selections. If you enable the Release Confirms check box, you may feel more comfortable.

       Figure 2-4: The Editing options in User Preferences.

       Input

The settings and controls in the Input options of the User Preferences editor have the greatest influence over how you interact with Blender. As Figure 2-5 shows, this section is extensive.

       Figure 2-5: The Input options in User Preferences.

      The largest part of this section – the event editor on the right side – is actually covered later in this chapter in the section “Using custom event maps.” However, the left-side column has quite a few useful settings as well:

      ✔ Presets: Blender ships with a small assortment of application interaction presets – a fancy way of saying hotkey and mouse configurations. In addition to the default preset, Blender also ships with a few presets that match the interaction styles of other popular 3D programs. You can use this datablock-like menu to choose an existing preset, create a new one, or delete a preset you never want to use.

      ✔ Emulate 3 Button Mouse: Blender was designed to be used with a three-button mouse. However, not all computers have three-button mice, and some artists prefer to work with drawing tablets that don't have an easily accessible middle mouse button. Enabling this option helps these users compensate by using Alt+left-click to do what is normally done with the middle-click.

      ✔ Continuous Grab: Continuous Grab is a cool feature that allows you to continue moving an object even after your mouse cursor has reached the edge of the editor. Continuous Grab is very useful and enabled by default, but it doesn't work as nicely for users working with a tablet interface, so you can disable it here if you need to.

      ✔ Select With: Blender's default behavior is to select objects with the right mouse button. However people migrating to Blender from other programs may be more comfortable selecting with the left mouse button. This control lets you switch between the two. I cover this setting later in this chapter in the section “Selecting objects.” A word of warning: Setting this value to Left disables the Emulate 3 Button Mouse feature.

      ✔ Emulate Numpad: This setting is a very handy option for laptop users. As you see in the next section, Blender makes use of the numeric keypad for quick access to top, front, side, and camera views in the 3D View. Unfortunately, most laptop users don’t have an easily accessible numeric keypad on their keyboards. As a workaround, the Emulate Numpad option uses the number keys at the top of the keyboard to have the functionality that the corresponding numpad numbers have. This control in User Preferences disables the normal layer-switching functionality that the number keys at the top of the keyboard normally perform, but the ability to quickly change views tends to be more valuable to users than the ability to quickly change layers.

      ✔ Orbit Style: By default, Blender uses the Turntable setting. However, some users have difficulty navigating to a particular part of their scenes or models when using Turntable setting. For them, the Trackball setting may be more comfortable.

      The difference between the two settings may seem subtle to a new user, but if you're used to one orbit style, it can be very disorienting to try working in the other.

      ✔ Invert Zoom Direction: Similar to the Orbit Style option, some people are more comfortable scrolling forward to zoom out and back to zoom in. This setting gives users that option.

       Add-ons

      Blender ships with an assortment of extensions, called add-ons, which provide users with additional capabilities within Blender. For example, if you're a veteran Blenderhead and you're used to the old Spacebar menu from much earlier versions of Blender, there's an add-on that puts that feature back. Other add-ons modify Blender's interface, add new primitive objects, or provide additional tools that can help speed up your work. Another key feature of add-ons is that they are tightly integrated into Blender's interface. Once an add-on is enabled, its functionality looks and works just like native features in Blender, like it was there all along!

You can manage all add-ons from the Add-ons section of User Preferences, as shown in Figure 2-6.

       Figure 2-6: The Add-ons options in User Preferences.

      There are three types, or support levels, for add-ons:

      ✔ Official: These add-ons officially ship with Blender on release. Core development team supports them and ensures that they continue to work with each Blender release.

      Although these add-ons come with Blender, they aren't all enabled by default, because some of them favor very specific workflows.

      ✔ Community: These add-ons also officially ship with Blender on release. However, rather than being supported by the core developers, the add-ons at this support level are maintained by community developers (usually the people who first wrote them). None of these add-ons are enabled by default, but many of them are very useful.

      I'm not just saying that because I wrote one of them. I promise!

      ✔ Testing: There are two kinds of add-ons at this support level:

      ● Very new add-ons that haven't been thoroughly tested by users.

      ● Veteran add-ons that