Welcome to Advanced Layout
Control! In this video you will re-enforce
your layout behavior. How to effortlessly switch
between layouts. How to use Blender on two screens, so if you've got two
or more screens you can actually move Blender onto those and have an even
bigger and better interface. Lots more control you can have that. We're going to
learn some of the shortcuts for the editor types as well. So let's hop straight on
over into Blender!
So, just had a funny quirk happen to me a few moments
ago, where I went to File and New and my
layout went all funny. It went like this. If that does happen to you, because
Layout, Blender's layout can become a bit distorted like this
occasionally, what I tend to do is I tend to grab the window, and you can see then it
resets itself. And then I can just go ahead and make it full
screen again. So that's one of the ways of getting around, one of those quirks that tends to
happen. OK, so some more advanced control! I will
teach you guys how to make new windows and how to remove ones that you don't
want. So the first thing I'm going to do is, I'm going to hit the little plus button
and create my layout. I'm going to change this layout
there, so that what we do now is not going to
destroy the Default layout. Of course, if you do destroy the Default layout,
then I'll teach you the skills to get back to it as well. So what
I would like you to do first of all is just watch me, because I'm going
to be clicking again on areas that are quite small, on the screen, so
you can see where my cursor is going. And then, I'll give you the opportunity, during the challenge,
to test the knowledge that you've just learned. So first of all,
let's go ahead and create another one of these 3D windows,
and we can do that by the little hashes that are in the top-right and the
bottom-left of every editor window. If we have a look at
the Info Header, and literally it's tiny,
It's this little area at the top here. But we've got a hashed area there
on the lower-left and we've got a hashed area all the way on the upper-right as well.
And that enables us to click with the left mouse button and
drag it to create a new window. I'm not going to do it to the tiny area up there
but I'm going to do it to this 3D Editor window now. Now because the hash
area that we're just about to drag on belongs to the 3D
Editor window, we can tell that because the triangle's in the top
corner or the bottom corner. When we click and drag, that
is the window that we'll duplicate, including as to whether or not it's got its Tool
Shelf open on the left-hand side here or whether it's not.
Now, that gives us an opportunity to generate a lot of
windows in our scene. And I've seen people go, that try
to move it left and right and they've accidentally grabbed this area here, and they go, oh
no I don't, I don't want that! How do I?! Oh no, what's going on?! [Laughs] You can very
quickly end up with quite a messy interface. Now, there are two
important rules, when it comes to collapsing the windows on top of one
another. For a start, you can only collapse, If you're using
this top widget you can only collapse, um first of all,
to areas that are of the same shape. So
if I try and collapse this big window here down to where these two small
windows have appeared that just won't work. I'll need these two smaller windows
to first be a larger window, before I can do anything with that.
So in order to collapse these, what I would do is I'd pick the
bottom one and push it up or the right-hand side and push it to the
right, if I was using this top Splitter Widget.
That's what they're called. If I'm using the bottom one, then I can
push down or to the left. Of course, I can't push to the left, in this case,
becausee it's not the same size. So let's use
the top ones, at the moment. I tend to go for the top ones because they're easier to get your hands
on or your cursor on. If I go ahead and click on
that... I've just opened up another window, I didn't mean to do that
unfortunately but that is easy to do. And this just shows you how
fragile, I supposed the actual layout can be, if you're not
paying full 100% attention. So now that I've done this,
I'm going to have to click on again this Splitter Widget. I'm going to be
very precise this time and move it across to the right, to overcome
the one on the right. And I'm going to do the same here,
I'm going to pick this one after... Again, it's very easy to do! I'm going to pick this
one up here and pull it up, and you can see that an arrow appears when I do
that and that shows you the direction of overwriting.
Now, what I'm going to do here, just to demonstrate, is I'm going to turn one of these views
to something different like a Dope Sheet, let's say. So we've got
this Dope Sheet in the middle of two 3D views. Now what I can do,
in order to make this Dope Sheet appear on this half of our screen,
is go ahead and click on the Splitter Widget and move it over,
and we can see that, that is going to overwrite the one on the
right. OK, now, on, if we
want it to go to the left we've got a couple of options. We can click the Splitter Widget down
here and move it on the lower-left and move it to the left, or we could do
the upper-right. Oh, I've done it again! It's so easy to
do! So don't worry guys if you end up doing this, because click and move over to the right
and we can see here that nice big arrow, which tells us which way we're going to be overwriting.
However, with the Left Mouse Button still clicked
still pressed down, I can now move the arrow to the other way.
And we can see that the screen flips
and we're going to overwrite the 3D View with the Dope Sheet.
Very powerful, enables us to go backwards and forwards and
use either one, and I switched back there to the 3D View.
So one of the other things that you can do as well is customize the Header Bars.
So we've already learned that you can hide them out of the way, which is
a little bit irritating, if you do it accidentally and click the plus to bring it
back again. But we can customize it, we can right-click on it and flip it to the top,
right-click on it and flip it to the bottom. And I
would recommend not changing the layout until
you know what you really want to do with it. It might be conceptually
good for you to go, well the Header Bar should be at the top of the
screen. But of course, if you move all your Header Bars to the top of the screen,
I am not going to do that. You may struggle to follow along if I keep
saying, if you now go down to the Header Bar, because I'm going to assume throughout
the course that you don't change your layout to
much. I'm going to stay with the standard layout through most of this course and
only make changes where I need them. So for instance, if I'm struggling to
fit something on the screen, I may make a change that you don't have to follow, it's
just so I can see what's going on. One of the other great things that
you can do, if you've got more than one monitor, is you can
duplicate the entire window in front of you and create another
window that you can work on. And you do that through the Window menu on
the Info . So if we go ahead and click on Window
and go to Duplicate Window, and we can see there's a shortcut key there, Control
Alt and W. Now, most of the options in Blender do
have shortcut keys, and Blender is incredibly shortcut key
heavy. And in a few lectures time, we'll be going over those shortcuts because they do
vary a little from system to system. So I'm going to go ahead here and duplicate
the window. Now it's going to look like nothing has happened, and
that's because the duplicate window is on top of the one we're working on. So what
we're going to do here is just move one of these windows and fill up the right-hand
side of the screen and one to fill up the left. Now what we notice here is
both of these were on the, My Layout, the layout I created first
of all, but you can see that the moment I've duplicated the window, we've got
this My Layout.001. And that basically means
that I've created a new layout as well by doing that. They obviously
can't share the same... Well they can share the same layout, but that means if I
adjust one it will adjust the other, and that's kind of not the point, when you want a
duplicate window. You'll often want a full screen, let's say of you working with
two monitors. You might want a full screen render happening, or you
might want a full screen 3D editor
on all the time, so you can do all your modeling in one screen and all of your options
on another. It's very powerful!
One of the things to bear in mind here is, when you start collapsing
these down, then you want to get rid of it, if I went ahead...
And we can see it's blatantly obvious, at this point in time, that this one says
My Layout and this one says My Layout.001, so we know which one is the
master so to speak and which one the duplicate came from. If I
go and click on this drop-down for these view selection
and change one to Default and
one to Animation, that's great! But I now don't
know which one's which, I could even shuffle them.
OK, so now that we don't know which one's
which, if I went and shut down the master or tried to shut down the master,
ah! So which one was the master there? It's obviously this one on
the left. If I go ahead and create a new duplicate window
and try and shut down the master, we get this warning
message. So do you want to exit Blender? Well no I don't.
I'm demonstrating stuff at the moment, so I'm going to click Cancel. But I know now that
this is not the master, it is kind of the slave I
suppose, and we can click on the cross there and get rid of it. Going to make this one full
screen again. Now one of the things to bear in mind, when you start doing that duplication,
is this can start to get a bit cluttered. So we've got Default.001.
Now if you happen to be in a window,
and that was the one that you duplicated to make another window, we would
very quickly end up with Default.001, Default.002,
and if that perpeturated, we'd end up with a lot of clutter
in that menu system. Oh, and Default.002
is actually the master in this case, so let's close down the one that's not.
OK, so how do we get rid of this. Well there's a cross there, and if we do that we
can delete the active screen. So we've got a series of options here,
Default.002, delete the active scene, delete the active scene. I
don't need those and I don't want them to clutter up here. My Layout.001,
I'm going to delete that because it is identical to My Layout, and having
it in duplicates all over the place is going to be a pain. OK,
so now we've mastered more advanced layout techniques and moving things about.
There's just one final thing and that's the shortcut keys for
the actual changing of the screens. So we can go ahead, straight
away, and hold down Shift and use the F number along the top of the keyboard.
Now if you're running a Mac or Linux, you may find that this also
activates some system keys, but let's just go see what happens. So Shift and F1
gives us the File menu. We can see up here
it's changed it to the File Browser, that's what it's called here. Shift and F2
changes it to a different one, and Shift and F3, Shift and F4, etc.
etc. Shift and F5 is the 3D View. Now all of these, when
you go to them, they go full screen apart from the Info Header at the
top, which is very powerful, and there is a button to go back to
previous. And it'll take us back to the previous one, of course, because I've been
playing about. It's not taking us back to the 3D View, because we've iterated
it through, so I'll need to go back down here to the Header Bar for this
particular window and change it back to the 3D View. Now if I keep going
along there, so we were on Shift and F5, Shift F6, Shift F7, Shift F8.
You can see it's going through them. There's the Outliner. There's the
UV Image Editor. Ah, so Shift and F11,
if it did control anything, is actually controlling something else
to do with Blender. So it is important... Sorry, something else
to do with the operating system itself and not Blender. So it's
worthwhile bearing those particular ones in mind. Now I
don't use those shortcut key. I generally
go down to the icon itself and select the one that
I want, primarily I suppose, to make sure you guys can see what I'm
actively doing, rather than just randomly hitting shortcut keys all the time.
But feel free to learn those shortcut keys, so you can quickly
flip between different screens. And with
all that knowledge, I've got a layout challenge for you!
I would like you to get back to the Default Layout.
So go ahead and open up the LayoutMess.blend
from your resources. Now, if you haven't downloaded your resources yet,
remember they're against the talking heads at the beginning of every
section. And we put them there so they are not against any
specific video, so you can get them all at once. It's great if you need to work
offline at any point, then you've got all of the resources together. So make sure you've opened
it up. Now this itself is a ruined workspace,
which I would like you to get back to the Default layout.
And remember, I'd like you to also share your success. This not
only helps me know that you guys are understanding what
you're learning, but it also is wonderful to see you
progress. So please make sure, after you completed the challenge and any other,
that you share your work so we can all see how we're doing.
So pause the video now and give that a go!
OK guys
welcome back! Let's go and open up this layout mess and see how it looks!
OK so first of all, I would just like to say that I have
extracted the Section 1 Assets into their own folder.
I've named it in my documents file system here. I've named it in documents
Section 1, LayoutMess. Now what I would like you guys to do
is make sure you don't end up being a bit messy with your
file system. Now later, at the moment, it really
doesn't matter that much, but it's very good to engrain
the habit of good file structure and good naming. So
be aware of that from now onwards, because
later on, it's going to become critical that things are stored in an
appropriate place and are named appropriately as well.
Otherwise it can be very confusing and things can start to break and fall
apart and we don't want that.
So let's go ahead and open up LayoutMess!
OK wow! OK, so we've got
a bit of a LayoutMess here! Now, there are going to be two ways of solving this problem.
Now, if I haven't changed the Default screen
layout, I should be able to get back to it through the Info
Header. I'm not sure whether I've done that, Mm, so let's go and
work with that first of all.
So let's go and change this
type to an Info Header, and change it from
My Layout to Default. Bingo! OK,
so if you went through that way, well done, kudos for you being able
to think ahead and go, well if Mike left the Default layout I should
be able to get back at that, to it that way. But let's presume that
I had overwritten it, which is entirely possible.
So I'm going to go to File and Revert. That's
going to take us back to the previous state the file was in.
So what can we do here? Well there are a couple of ways
of approaching this. You can get the layout roughly right and then change all the window
types and that's what I'm going to do, rather than doing it individually at the time.
So I'm going to, first of all, I'm going to move this
one out and then down, and that will give us the...
What was it? This is Outliner and this was
Properties. So that one's fine, that one's sorted over there. This one here, well
there's an Info Bar at the top, and then, there was a
Timeline at the bottom, so let's put a Timeline there. And
this was a 3D View. 3D View has a header
down at the bottom. OK, so I'm going to right-click here and Flip to the Top
there. So the Outliner's now looking like it looked before, and of course, the
cube would be somewhere in our scene, looking kind of like that.
That I think it looks like normally!
OK, so we saw there that there were actually two ways in
which to accomplish this challenge, and you'll find that that comes up
a lot when we're going through Blender. There will always be more than
one way of accomplishing the task, especially when it comes to modeling.
Now there are often efficient ways of working or different ways of working,
and sometimes I will do something to demonstrate the lesson we've just learned.
But of course, if you know another way of doing it, as long as you get to the same
end result, and you're aware of the other way of doing it as well, that's a
great way to progress. It shows that you guys are thinking
outside of the box, going beyond of what I've taught you as well, and being
able to apply all of your knowledge, so that's brilliant! Remember, of course,
I'd like to share your work, so that we can all join in and
see what's going on. It's brilliant for myself, I see you guys
progressing. It's a great sense of achievement all around. And of course,
I will see you guys now in the next lecture!