Pie menus are basically limited to a maximum of eight menu items. (It’s possible to have more items, but if a pie menu has more than eight items, it becomes cluttered and the speed and memory advantages of pie menus are lessened.) Blender has a number of very long menus; therefore, they don’t all translate nicely to the pie menu model. This means that some menus will be pies and others will not. Hopefully, as development continues on Blender, these menus will migrate to being more pie-like.
Some pie menus aren’t enabled by default. A number of hotkeys are bound to pie menus already, but you can enable even more as add-ons from Preferences. (Read more about Blender add-ons in Chapter 2.)
The process of enabling additional pie menus is easy:
1 Open User Preferences (Edit ⇒ Preferences) and go to the Add-ons section.
2 On the search field on the upper right of the window, type pie menu.The add-on list should have one choice available: 3D Viewport Pie Menus.
3 Enable the pie menu add-on you want by left-clicking its check box.Additional pie menus are now enabled.
That’s it! By default, Blender automatically saves what you set in Preferences, so additional pie menus will be automatically enabled each time you start Blender.
To try out pie menus, you don’t have to actually enable any add-ons at all. With your mouse cursor in the 3D Viewport, press Ctrl+Tab to show the Mode pie menu. You should see a menu like the one in Figure 1-6. Throughout this book, you’ll see what each of these modes can be used for. The point here is to recognize pie menus and know how to use them.
FIGURE 1-6: Your first pie (menu)!
With the menu still visible, move your mouse cursor around the screen. Notice that the highlighted area of the circular slice indicator at the center of the menu points to your mouse cursor. Also notice that as you move your mouse cursor, individual menu items highlight when you enter their slice of the menu. This highlighting is how you know which menu item is currently ready to be picked. Press Esc to close the menu without selecting anything.
You can choose menu items in a pie menu in two ways:
Press, release, click: This can be considered the standard method:Press and release the hotkey that activates the menu.In this example, press and release Ctrl+Tab.Move your mouse cursor to your desired menu item’s slice.Choose that menu item by clicking anywhere within its slice.The current active slice is indicated by the circular slice indicator at the center of the menu, as well as the highlighting of each menu item as your mouse cursor enters its slice.
Press, hold, release: I think of this method as the fast way.Press and hold the hotkey that activates the menu.In this example, press and hold Ctrl+Tab.Move your mouse cursor to your desired menu item’s slice.Release the hotkey to choose that menu item.
Even without enabling any add-ons, pie menus are still used throughout Blender’s interface, so it’s worth getting used to them. One of the advantages of the add-ons is that they enable you to configure which hotkeys have an associated pie menu, so you can disable some of those pies if you’d like.
Chapter 2
Understanding How Blender Thinks
IN THIS CHAPTER
It’s time to get intimate with Blender. No, I don’t mean you need to start placing scented candles around your computer. I mean that this chapter’s focus is a detailed introduction to Blender’s interface and how you can start finding your way around in it. First of all, it’s pretty important to have an understanding of the various types of editors that Blender has and how to access them. These editors are the gateways and tools for creating whatever you want.
With the knowledge of what you can do with these editors, the next thing is actually building those creations. To do so, you need to understand how to work in a virtual three-dimensional space, and specifically, you need to understand how Blender handles that space. I also cover these topics in this chapter.
Looking at Editor Types
In many ways, Blender isn’t so much one program as it is a bunch of different programs sharing the same interface and access to the same data. Thinking of it this way, each of Blender’s editor types is kind of its own little program in a Blender area.
That said, once you’re in a workspace, you still have the ability to re-organize and adjust it, adding and removing areas and editors as you see fit. As noted in the previous chapter, a Blender area can contain any editor type. You can see what editor types are available by left-clicking the button on the far left of that editor’s header. Figure 2-1 shows the menu that appears when you press this button.
FIGURE 2-1: The Editor Type menu.
Each editor type serves a specific purpose, but you can organize them into four basic categories, as shown in the menu: general editors, animation editors, scripting editors, and data editors. The following subsections give you an overview of each editor, organized by category.
General editors
The editors covered in this section are usually the most common way of interfacing with objects in your 3D scene and actually creating things in Blender.
