Hello everybody and welcome back.
This is going to be a quick tip lecture on blenders preferences.
Now the preferences section you may have already been to under edit and preferences now blenders Preferences
window is also an edit to type.
You can notice it's there at the very end under the Data column.
I'm going to open it up in its own window which is under edit and preferences.
There we go.
We've got our own little window that sits on top.
Now sometimes if that's already open it will open up behind everything else and that can be well the
easiest way to say is annoying because you click on blender preferences and it doesn't open.
So a couple of key blender preferences here we've already gone through a few of them.
So under the General tab we'll start there because that's where it's opened.
I would make sure that you've got cycles compute device and have a look to see whether or not you can
use graphic card acceleration will go into much more detail in that later in the course if you can do
a couple of tests.
Now if you have an integrated graphics card you may find that even though you've got a graphics card
selected it isn't any better than your CPA.
In fact there are some CPE used that will outperform a graphics card.
It doesn't make sense if you think for a graphics card is to do graphics with but that's just how it
is some CPE use are more powerful this way round is fine with me I need my processor to record the screen
and do other things at the same time.
So I've got it set to my internal graphics card.
The next system tab files.
Now one of the things that you may have noticed if we go and open up where you're saving your files
is you end up with these dot blend one files sitting everywhere.
Well what are they.
Well they're blenders own versioning system so if I go ahead and or I've missed it.
There we go blender Preferences window and go down to save and load and open up that's why I scroll
down we see it says save versions one so keeps an older version of the blend file that you're working
on and you can increase that all the way up to 32 if you wanted to I wouldn't manage my files like that
in fact at this point now I've pointed it out only set it to zero because I manage the versioning of
my files completely differently.
So this this setting may not be for everyone.
It basically means if you hit save you can go back one save if you want to and I'm going to save my
preferences so that every new blend to file the I open will have that setting which is really useful
when I open up auto save auto save temporary in temporary files Yep time every two minutes that's absolutely
fine for me and I'm sure blender will crash at some point and we'll have to use it in anger.
Right.
The other thing to just show you with the Save versions is how to open up a prior version.
So if we go to file an open your dot blend ones do not exist in this list we have to go up to the top
right.
We can see that the filter button has been pressed and we're filtering for any folders and blend files.
Well the next one along is dot blend One two three etc files so if we turn that's on we can see our
other files that we can open up in Blender if we need to.
Because that's the only way we're going to be able to do it with the exception of going into your file
manager and renaming the file.
I'm going to cancel that for the moment.
So I don't want to open up.
Let's go back to our preferences and go over a few others.
Let's go from the top interface resolution scale I find really important because I'm trying to show
you guys what's on my screen.
However if your eyesight is really good you can make that smallest of the interfaces out of your way
or you can make it really big if your eyesight is not that good.
I'm gonna send it back to one point two five.
I'm not going to go through all of the preferences and details just the ones that I find are important
to get on the about themes.
This is where you can go ahead and select the blender lights or blender dark or indeed install a different
theme.
Now the difference between blend the lights and blended dark.
Well if we switch the blender light now you can see it's a lot brighter.
Now personally I use this one on my laptop because I often use my laptop in lights environments and
having it set dark makes things very difficult to read sometimes.
If we go down to inputs these are key if you want to use Blender efficiently on a laptop you can emulate
your num pad if you put a tick in that box.
It means the numbers across the top of the keyboard rather than a dedicated num pad will now function
exactly like a number pad does.
And you can emulate a three button mouse with out and left mouse that can be really useful if for some
reason you don't have a three button mouse or indeed you're using a trackpad on a laptop whilst we're
in the input tab I'm going to go to view manipulation Orbitz and pan now personally what I like is when
I'm orbiting I wants to be able to orbit around what I have selected some kind of person tick in orbit
around selection.
This simply means that when I've got something selected blenders not going to rotate around the object
in some arbitrary manner.
It's going to rotate literally around whatever selected auto perspective we're going to lever on it
simply means that when you go into one of the side front top bottom views it automatically goes to awful
graphic perspective.
Zoom.
Occasionally I turn on zoom to mouse position that generally is when I'm working with a sculpt or if
I'm working on something.
What I do have to zoom in and out lots of a larger object.
Now in general I will leave it off it's not necessary but later on especially when we get to the sculpting
or more complex objects you may see me turn that on in order to do that.
And again that's the great thing about blender.
If you turn things on you can turn them off again.
It really is customizable to whatever you want.
Now want to skip off of this now and go to add ons add ons add ons islands we will use add ons as we
go through the course I'm not going to turn any on at the moment I'll introduce you to them as we go
now add ons are brilliant they enable additional functionality or workflow improvements within blender
and often they can be free because they're developed by the community for the community there are also
some amazing paid for add ons as well and I will show you a couple of those as we go through the course
where they do genuinely help speed things along flip fluids is a great one but I'm not sure if it's
ready for 2.8 just yet and that's the other thing.
These are all dependent on being upgraded so if you're used to seeing something in this list that you
had before and doesn't work now well that's because the developer of that particular add on hasn't updated
it to work fully in 2.8.
Now before I shut down blender preferences I'm going to save my preferences and close that window.
Now one thing to bear in mind is that if you do screw something up in blender you can reset it back
to factory settings.
It's something that I'd only ever advise if you really needed to but that option is under file and load
factory settings.
So I've done that when I started teaching this course because I had saved the load of my other preferences
from playing around with it and I wanted to make sure it was a vanilla as possible.
When you guys joined me on this learning journey.
Finally if you do set up a different type of start file you can go ahead and save startup file.
Now that's typically used where you've got let's say you're constantly modelling humanoid figures so
you put instead of a cube you put a base mesh that's roughly human shape and then you just go at it
from there rather than having to import it all the time.
And of course once again you can change that depending on what your workflow is doing.
The other thing that you can do is if you start building up a collection of materials that you've made
you can save them in your startup file which means that every time you load up blender your materials
are there and ready for you rather than having to create them every time you open up blender.
Well that's it for the user preferences.
Lots of customization.
I should now be able to orbit around objects I have selected rather than just the center of the viewport
which is really useful.
That's what I wanted to do.
Perfect.
And I'll see you guys in the next lecture.