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Our Standard Production Interface
for Blender v2.46
Special Note for Ott Planetarium Production Staff
This will be the "official" interface model for the upcoming Production Conference. Please become familiar with it, as some of you will be helping conference attendees learn Blender in August. A standard interface will enable you to help the conference attendees quickly, without having to overcome UI differences across users. It is believed that this interface will help reduce some of the initial "shock" that new Blender users experience - but that's just me talking and I might be full of it. So please try it out and send me some feedback. Thanks. -Ron (ronproctor@gmail.com) Blender's default interface seems to be a holdover from the distant past (we're talking pre-TRON here). New users often become frustrated with the default UI's many quirks, like selecting with the Right Mouse Button, navigating the 3D views, and the goofy window placements. We're here to tell you that you don't have to take it! Blender can be a breeze - you just need to show it who's boss. One of the most powerful (and overlooked) features of Blender is the ability to almost completely customize the interface (custom hotkey bindings planned for Blender v2.5). If there's something about the interface that you don't like, you can (and should) change it! Doing so will facilitate faster learning and more efficient production! We recommend the following interface options. As you make your changes, take time to experiment. Figure out what each option means. When you're happy with your changes, click: File > Save Default Settings. The next time you load Blender it will be just the way you like it! ...And don't worry about breaking anything! If you think you've messed things up, you can restore the default interface by clicking File > Restore Factory Settings. Your Mouse and Keyboard You need a mouse with two buttons and a scroll wheel (known as a "three button mouse," if you count the clicky wheel). If you don't already have one of these, climb out from under that rock and go spend the fifteen bucks (and optical is the standard these days, rock dwellers). If you are among the enlightened (a Mac user), you probably have a Mighty Mouse. Fortunately these are a lot smarter than they look. They're stuffed to the gills with sensor doodads that know where your fingers are when you click! So although it looks like the Mighty Mouse isn't a So you enlightened Mac people with the mighty mice need to get into your System Preferences to enable the second and third buttons, and maybe disable the "squeeze" feature (optional). Should look something like this: 
Also: you enlightened Mac users will probably have special OS functions assigned to your "F-keys" (...F8, F9, F10...). Blender has functions assigned to these keys, but those functions can be accessed through Blender's Graphical User Interface, so changing the OS key bindings is optional. You can change that stuff in the Keyboard settings. Your Basic Fulldome .blend File Our UI Settings We now present our recommended interface settings. These fix some of those things in Blender that can be so frustrating to new users. (Like selecting stuff with the right mouse button...who does that?) We thought it would be easier to just show you some screen shots of our settings. This menu is sometimes known Blender's "hidden" preferences menu. You can get to it by dragging the black border directly under the menu bar downward (that's the black border right under where it says "File Add Timeline ..." near the top of the window). This page shows you how. Compare your settings to ours. Experiment. Have fun! 
Further Reading For more information on customizing the interface, check out this tutorial: Blender 3D: Noob to Pro - The Blender Interface |