The Blender Interface

Topics: Managing Blender's User Interface

Level: beginner

C-key: not required

This tutorial will give you a working understanding of the blender interface and how to customize it to your liking.
 

Overview


 This is the default blender screen
when you launch Blender for the
first time.  As you can see Blender has a
LOT of buttons. Teaching you each one is beyond the scope of this book. Blender's 
manual explains the function of each button in Blender. This is just a general walkthru of the interface.

Here is a markup of what you 
are seeing. As illustrated Blender presents you with 3 rows of windows by default. These three windows comprise the current "screen."
 

The Blender interface can contain  many screens. You can think of a screen as a kind of bookmark for  a particular window setup.
The Blender interface is organized as series
of "windows" of varying functions. You can create multiple windows on a single screen.
Giving that screen a name is an easy way to store your customized setup.

You will find the Screen  MENUBUT 

at the top left of the screen.

Blender comes with 3 preconfigured screens
but can renamed them by #LEFT_MOUSE 
clicking on it or add new screens
by selecting "ADD NEW"

In order to create windows in a screen,  place  your cursor at the border between to existing windows and click the #CENTER_MOUSE button. You will get the following dialog:

Click on it with the #LEFT_MOUSE button 
to confirm the creation of the new border.
You probably will get a clone of an adjacent
window. To change it to something else
look for the header of the window. It is a row of buttons that is on the top
or bottom of each window. The leftmost button selects the window type use the #LEFT_MOUSE  button on the black dots 
to the left and right of the button to scroll 
through the window types. I' will go into 
the different window types in a moment.


This is an example of a screen that is optomized for animation



The default screen named "screen.002" is optimized for post processing

There  are twelve types of buttons in Blender
 


BUT: 
a simple button that activates a process with one #LEFT_MOUSE click



TOGBUT:
a button that be toggled between 
two boolean choices with the click of the #LEFT_MOUSE button.




TOG3BUT:
a button that be toggled between 
three boolean choices with the click of the #LEFT_MOUSE button.



ROWBUT:
These are radio buttons in which only one button can be selected at a time.


NUMBUT:
Drag on this button with the 
#LEFT_MOUSE button to increase
or decrease it''s numeric value. Use #SHIFT#LEFT_MOUSE button
to edit the value directly.


NUMSLI:
This works just like NUMBUT except that it has a cute slider
you can drag. 



TEXTBUT:
This button is generally used for naming object blocks in Blender. 
To change the text of this button use the #LEFT_MOUSE button on it.



MENUBUT:
When you #LEFT_MOUSE click on the little 3d minus sign it will reveal a selection of different
TEXTBUT values.


ICONBUT:
Same as BUT but with a helpful image.


ICONTOG:
Same as TOGBUT but with an image.


ICONROW:
The iconed verson of ROWBUT.


ICONSLI:
This button works like NUMBUT
except that it has two small black arrows on either side of the button
that can be used for slow scrolling 
of the sliding choices.

Individual Window types
 


There are many pop-up or pupwindows. They are triggered by hotkey combos. The #SPACEBAR will launch the main TOOLBAR.


This another pupmenu used for precise alignment of a mesh. 
Other pupmenus will be mentioned in subsequent tutorials.


The 3d window is where most of your visualation and modeling will take place.  It can also do animation previews with the ALT-A keyborad combo. A shaded
view can be used via the z key.



The Ipo window is used for   precise ipo/animation curve editing. It is often used in conjunction with the 3d window.



The Object oriented  programming 
(OoP) window is used to visual the abstract heirarchal relationships
between  blender  objects in a scene.



The buttons window represents
and sets many basic and advaced settings for lighting , materials, textures , worlds, camera's, meshes,curves,radiosity and special effects.



The file window is for opening and saving blender files.



Blender can represent an image as an object in the scene. This window allows you view imported images.



The info window is used for setting default belnder settings. It is "hidden" above the top of your screen. To reveal it pull down the 
border till you see the hidden buttons.



The sequence window is used for non linear video editing . This is where different  video scenes  can be  cut and spliced into one movie.
Transitions and other video effects can be added here.



This window is a recent addition
to blender. Useful for reading 
README files, tutorials and 
python scripts.



This window is for loading Image objects into blender. 

That's it for the Interface tour. Buy the official manual from NAN to get more in-depth descriptions of the topics we discussed.