Datasheet

Work Areas and Window Types n 5

You are now looking at your Blender desktop, which should appear a lot like

Figure 1.1. The Blender desktop consists of a nonoverlapping conﬁguration of windows.

By default, the windows are arranged as shown in Figure 1.2. As you can see, ﬁve win-

dows appear in this conﬁguration. Each window holds a different editor type as identi-

ﬁed in the ﬁgure. The darker gray areas indicate the placement of each window’s header.

Headers can be displayed at the top of a window, at the bottom of the window, or not at

all. You’ll see what each editor type is for shortly.

You can resize each window by clicking one of the window’s borders and dragging

to enlarge or reduce the size of the window, as illustrated in Figure 1.3. You can split a

window into two identical windows by clicking the upper-right or lower-left corner of

the window and dragging in the direction that you want the window to be split, as shown

in Figure 1.4. You can also merge windows that share a complete border by clicking the

upper-right or lower-left corner and dragging across the border that you want to be elim-

inated, as shown in Figure 1.5. In this way, you can arrange the windows on your Blender

desktop with a great deal of freedom.

Obviously, splitting a window into two identical windows is of limited use unless you

can change the content of the windows, which of course you can. All windows are created

equally in Blender; any window can display any editor type. The editor type displayed

in a particular window is determined by the icon at the leftmost corner of the window’s

header. You can select which editor type is displayed by choosing it from the menu shown

in Figure 1.6.

Figure 1.2

The default window

arrangement

Info Bar

3D Viewport (with Tool

Shelf Displayed)

Timeline

Outliner

Properties

Window

427378c01.indd 5 3/19/11 1:45:07 PM