My Blender Settings

Here are some assorted settings I have used that you might find useful.

Tip: When ever change a setting that you want to be come part of the default scene, you need to select Save User Settings in the File menu towards the top of the default scene or press Ctrl + U.  Unfortunately this will also make anything else that is in your scene part of the default scene.  You can quickly delete these extra “stuff” and quickly save your user settings.

User Preferences

• Interface Tab
  • Show Python Tooltips [Uncheck] [Cleans up the tooltips.  This is only really useful if you do any Python scripting.]
  • Zoom To Mouse Position [Check] [Allows you to zoom where you point the mouse cursor in Object/Edit mode.]
  • Rotate Around Selection [Check] [Allows you to rotate around what is selected, useful when editing a mesh.]
• Input Tab
  • Mouse > Continuous Grabe [Enable] [This allows you to continually move across a view port window]
  • Select With: [Enable "Left"] [Matches the selected mouse button in the editor]
• Add-Ons
  • Import-Export [Enable/Disable any appropriate format you may use to keep your menu clean]
• Themes
  • 3D View
    • Grid/Window Background [Here you can change the color of the grid lines and the background.]
• File
  • Save & Load
    • Show Thumbnails [Enabled] [Images and movie files will show a thumbnail image]

Be sure to select the “Save as Default” button in the lower left hand fof the screen.

Main Window

• Blender offers an extremely flexible layout for the windows.  Depending on your editor view port layout and workflow, arrange the windows as needed.  I have my modeling layout with 2 side by side windows.  One is used for perspective view, the other for an orthographic view (which I assigned mouse buttons to switch between the 3 main views).
• You can also toggle quad view by selecting the View menu (in the 3D View window), then Toggle Quad View.  Keep in mind this will change 1 view port to 4 smaller viewports.
• It’s a good idea to set up your grid lines/spacing.  Keep in mind that each view port can have difference settings than others.  Be sure to set them up the same or set up one and duplicate it.
  • Select the N key to bring up the view properties.  In the Display section, check Grid Floor and enable the X, Y, Z axis.  Set Lines to 3, Scale to 64, and Subdivisions to 8.
  • The Grid Floor will allow a very simple grid to be displayed in perspective view and show the 3 axis as well.
  • Blender units are the same as UT 3/UDK units.  For my needs of modeling environments, there is really no need to go below a 1 grid unit.  Setting Scale to 64, the smallest grid line you will ever see is 1 unit.
  • Setting the sub divisions to 8 will duplicate what the Unreal editors use.  Keep in mind that you can’t quickly change the grid size like you can in the Unreal editors.  While in Object/Edit mode, the grid’s value will change as you zoom in and out.  You can enable “snap to grid” though, which will be useful for certain models.
• The 3d cursor is used for many things in Blender.  The most common is probably where a model will be placed in your scene.  Select the N key to bring up the view properties.  In the View section, enter a value of “0.00″ for each axis in the 3D Cursor Location fields.  This will place the 3D cursor in the center of the scene.  If you are creating 1 model per scene this will be useful in adding your objects in Blender.

Information Window

• You can have different screen layout of windows based on what you are doing (Animation, Compositing, Modeling, UV Editing, etc].  To the right of the Help menu, you will see where you can choose which layout to use, rename them, add/delete them as well.  At this time, I will only be doing modeling and UV Editing, I deleted the other screen layouts.  I configured each screen to work best for it’s purpose and saved my user settings.

My modeling screen layout.

My UV editing screen layout.