Blender 3D

Hello all,

After taking an break from Blender (which was broken up by that coin), I decided that now is the right time to not only get back into the .blend, but also begin using 2.5x. I have spent the last hour or two going through tutorials, guides, etc trying to figure this thing out.

To help those who have not made the switch yet, I’ve compiled a list of all the problems I ran into, and the solutions I used. I hope this will be helpful to others during their switch.

If I have missed something please feel free to post your solution.

1. Get back into the rotation:
a. The first thing I did was get into top view, this is important to do this now before we change our settings, it’ll save you a step later on. You can do side, left, top, whatever, but your rotation will be lopsided if you follow the below settings without first changing the view. Once we do the below steps, you can change it back to camera view if you really want to.

b. To access the user preference area, instead of dragging down the top bar like in 2.4x we now have a dedicated window:

c. I made the following changes to my user settings. BlenderNewbie’s Kernon Dillon posted a quick tip on the meaning of the Window Draw Method in the System tab. Automatic worked for me, but you may experience different effects. What we are still missing, however, is middle-mouse button to pan-view, rather than rotate-view. This is a little bit of an annoyance to me, but I’ll learn to get over it if I have to.

2. Make some hot(key) additions:
a. First take a look at this hot-key chart to see if you prefer the 2.5x defaults, or if you want to change them.

b. Based on this tutorial, let’s make some hot-keys! This will add hot-keys to switch between vertex, edge, and face modes when you are in edit mode. Making these additions should save you a lot of time by just hitting ’1′, ’2′, or ’3′ to switch between the three selection modes. It will not alter your layer-selection hot-keys while in the other modes.

c. If you want to change your hot-keys, just find the action you want to change by using the search box or scrolling through the options, then click over the applicable item that needs changing (mouse/keyboard + key).

3. Render window change:
I liked it when you hit render and a new window would pop up. In 2.53 it defaults to changing your 3d view to the image editor view, which you have to switch back once you’re done. I’m not a fan of this, and there are two ways to change it:
a. Basic change:

b. A more interesting change that will open the door to some interesting possibilities:

For this method you’ll have to render once, then make the above change. Now each time you render it’ll render to this window instead of the main 3d viewport.

Why is this a “more interesting” method? Well, you can make that “user preferences” window any window you want. This will open up some possibilities that hasn’t been explored in any other version of Blender. Do you want to have a window with all your mesh tools that you can move around and not have it docked to the side? There you go! Do you want to have a special window for image painting or UV mapping? There you go! The possibilities really are endless with Blender, and if you’ve used another 3d program before you know how useful these little floating windows can be.

These are just the first few things that I noticed that really bothered me, as more come up I’ll add to this post. Please feel free to add your own solutions to the 2.4x -> 2.5x move.

Happy .blending!