In order to minimize some of the selection options in various parts of the Blender interface, some features have been put aside in a repository. You could say they have been hidden away, so I will tell you where to go looking if you can’t find something. These features are listed in the add-ons directory in the user preferences window and may be activated and deactivated depending on what you are doing (Figure 1.29).
Figure 1.29
“Add – Armature” before the add-on is ticked See the supplements
page for more detailed information on installing add-ons.
This example shows the activation of an add-on.
In the 3D window, Shift + the A key is pressed to add an armature.
Without the add-on, only
“Single Bone” is avail-able. With the add-on ticked, “Human (Meta-Rig)” is added to the se-lection. “Rigging: Rigify”
is the name of a Python script that adds “Hu-man (Meta-Rig)” to the program. Python is the programming language for Blender.
“Add – Armature” after the add-on is ticked
“Rigging: Rigify” is ticked to activate the add-on.
Navigation
2
2.1 Navigate and Save 2.2 Windows Explorer
2.3 The Append or Link Command 2.4 Packing Data
2.5 Importing Objects
2.1 Navigate and Save
Th is section has been titled “Navigate and Save” since it is most important to understand where you are saving your work. As with all computer work, being organized will save you a lot of frustration down the road when you have created many fi les and want to fi nd some-thing. Blender is all about building up your own library of things that you have created or things that you have downloaded and want to use in future Blender masterpieces.
It is impossible to teach everything so I will assume that you know how to navigate around your computer system and create places where you store your fi les (if you are un-familiar with this, see Section 2.2 on Windows Explorer). In a Windows system, Windows Explorer is an invaluable tool for doing just that. It is recommended that you become famil-iar with your computer’s fi le system. At some stage you will want to save fi les, images, web pages, audio fi les, and obviously your Blender fi les and movie fi les.
We will discuss how you navigate in the Blender fi le browser and save your work to a location of your choice. Th e assumption is that you have created a fi le to save and a folder in which to save it. Th e creation of the folder is where Windows Explorer comes in. As a demonstration, we will use the default Blender scene with the cube object, the lamp, and the camera. I know that is not very exciting but we haven’t learned to do anything yet at this stage.
Open Blender with the default scene. In the info window header, click on “File.” In the drop down menu that is displayed, you will see “Save” and “Save As” (Figure 2.1).
Opening – Saving – Autosaving Files
Learning Unit 2
t Use “Save” to save a new file or to save work you have added to a file.
t Use “Save As” to save a copy of a file. You will have to give this a new name if you are saving it in the same folder as the original.
With our new default scene, click on “Save.” The Blender file browser window should open with the option “Save Blender File” in the top RH corner of the window. Where you see “untitled.blend” is the name of your file (Figure 2.2). Blender automatically names the file untitled.blend. Click on the name to highlight it, press Delete on the keyboard, then type in a new name and hit Enter. I have named my file Demo.blend. It is good practice to add the “.blend” suffix—
older versions of Blender did not automatically add it.
Just above where you have typed the name you will see the file path to where your file will be saved. On my computer this is “c:\temp\.”
Blender has automatically decided that if I do not say otherwise my file will be saved in the temp folder on the C: drive. You can see there is a previous .blend file already saved to this folder. The temp folder is
Figure 2.1
Figure 2.2 Drives on my PC
File path File name “Save Blender File”
41 2.1. Navigate and Save
not where I want my file to go, so I have made a new folder named “ABlenderDemo” on my C: drive for this new file (Figure 2.3). To navigate to this folder, I go into the system panel at the top LH side of the screen. In the panel you should see all the drives on my computer listed, the top one being the C: drive.
When I click on the “c:” in the panel all the folders on my C: drive display in the main browser window. ABlenderDemo is third from the top of the list. Note that just above where I typed in my file name Demo.blend, “c:\” is displayed. This tells me that I am looking at the C: drive. To put my new file into ABlenderDemo I click on it in the window. The main window is now showing the contents of folder ABlenderDemo, which is empty as it should be since I haven’t put anything into it. Now I click on “Save Blender File” at the top RH side of the screen. Blender displays the default blender scene again.
If you have followed these directions on your computer and want to prove that you have saved your file, change the window type to the file browser window. Click on the 3D window header icon and choose “File Browser.” And there’s Demo.blend in the c:\ABlenderDemo\
folder (Figure 2.4)!
Figure 2.3
Figure 2.4
Note: In the Blender default 3D window, the 3D window button/icon is in the lower LH corner of the window in the window header. In the file browser window, the but-ton is in the header at the top of the window at the LHS.
That should keep us out of trouble for the time being as far as saving our work, but it is a good idea to play around and find out what all the buttons in the file browser window do.
If you hit on one that says “Create a New Directory,” Blender just names it “New Folder,”
which isn’t all that helpful. With “New Folder” newly created, press Delete and retype a new name, then press Enter.
This has been a brief insight into navigating in the file browser window as well as show-ing how to save your work. Of course you can use the file browser to find other stuff as well.
Just click on a folder in the window and it opens showing what’s inside. There are some buttons at the top of the window that let you choose how the contents of the folders are dis-played (Figure 2.5). One helpful button lets you see files as thumbnails (pictures) so if you have photo images you can see them from within Blender (Figure 2.6).
Figure 2.5
Figure 2.6
Choose how the
files are displayed. Thumbnails
43