I just switched from 2.48 to 2.57, and on my 1024x768 monitor the layout is not very nice. How can I do any of the following:
Get rid of one of the three main panels, or areas, or whatever they’re called. I would like one main 3D view and one side panel or footer panel. I can move the boundaries so that one of the panels is quite thin, but I can’t make it go away completely.
Zoom out on a panel - like the “properties” panel, which seems to be the new name for “buttons” - so that it’s vaguely usable when set to horizontal. This used to be possible by holding control and turning the mousewheel: now that doesn’t work. I notice that the footer area has a larger font size than the right-hand vertical bar, for some obscure reason. (Perhaps that looked better on the interface designer’s enormous expensive monitor, with its 90 billion pixels? Probably he has to squint to read anything.)
Make the button bar vertical, or scrolling, or move it somewhere. If I have to have a vertical buttons, I mean “properties” panel, I have the problem that the actual buttons - Render, Scene, World, etc. - are laid out horizontally. If I want to see them all at once on a vertical panel, it has to take up a third of my screen.
Make Blender fullscreen, like it used to be. In 2.5 it has a space-hogging titlebar which serves no purpose other than to say “Blender”. I don’t need this information: I can already recognise what program I’m using by the familiarly horrible interface. I thought maybe alt+enter would put it into fullscreen mode, but no.
?
Edit: I found the zoom (numpad +/-), so that’s a start.
Edit 2: I got the 2-panel layout I wanted - I wanted to get rid of the right-side panel: turns out I had to merge the lower one with the main one as a first step, then merge the right one in as well, then recreate the lower one.
So that only leaves one question: can 2.5 run in fullscreen?
…Ha, found it: alt + F11. OK, now I’ve answered all my own questions. Nothing to see here…
Get rid of one of the three main panels, or areas, or whatever they’re called. I would like one main 3D view and one side panel or footer panel. I can move the boundaries so that one of the panels is quite thin, but I can’t make it go away completely.
To join/split windows, use the little triangles at window corners by clicking and draging them.
You can also right click the window border and select “Split” or “join”.
Do you mean, you want to make the header of the properties editor vertical? Impossible.
Well, I see what you mean that the buttons are taking to much horizontal space, but youll have to live with it. you can use the middle mouse button to scroll them, by either holding the mid mouse button and paning, or rotating the wheel.
Make Blender fullscreen
There is a button on the info editors header. Also, Alt-F11.
How are you not able to do this? I ask because you can do this in the exact same way as you do in 2.49 you don’t have to use the little corner triangle like Freemind mentioned if you are more comfortable with the old way of splitting and joining windows. Unless you are new to both versions of Blender that could explain a few things.
don’t use the properties panel in horizontal mode its meant to be used vertically, you can lay it out horizontally but it wasn’t really designed to be used in this manner.
the space hogging title bar that says blender is standard for every program so are you complaining for just the sake of complaining, look on the info bar there is a square with two arrows press that and blender should go into full screen mode.
blender has a useful search function so if you can’t find something press space and type it in, space and full screen would have told you the hotkey to press to go into full screen mode
Well, once I’d got them set up how I wanted in 2.4 I never moved them, so I was baffled by it being a three-stage process (join, join, split) to get what I wanted, starting with a panel that I didn’t want to change.
don’t use the properties panel in horizontal mode its meant to be used vertically, you can lay it out horizontally but it wasn’t really designed to be used in this manner.
Luckyly the putting panels in horizontal will be fixed sometime in the future.
However, I think turning off the feature for horizontal panels would be a good idea for the time being…
…Which is only visible if I click the button that hides the menus on the header. Normally this large friendly “fullscreen” button is off the screen. Pfft.
Here’s another question: how do I save these kind of settings? It remembers my panel layout alright, but it always starts up with the lower panel set to the timeline (why assume I would be making an animation?) and it doesn’t retain the zoom level or the position of the panel boundary, or start in fullscreen. Every time I start Blender I have to move the boundary, zoom out, change the panel to something useful, and hit fullscreen. “Save user settings” doesn’t save this part of the setup, and “save as default” from within user preferences doesn’t do it either.
yes, this thread doesn’t really seem to be about anything else than a request for help with blender ui. there’s nothing wrong with it, and i’m glad you are learning blender, but from now on, please use our dedicated support section of the forum for questions.