This has to be the most frustrating aspect in Blender I’ve come across. Because it’s so simple, yet brings work to a halt. I’ve accidentally messed up the panels before and had to start over with new default layouts (but settings I want were lost). In this case, I just can’t get the panel that shows the headers of “world, scene, materials” etc. to show up. The other two big bread and butter panels are easily brought up by hot keys “T” and “P”… but not this one! This one is gone. If I want to make any changes to my model now, I can’t. This is such a crucial panel, yet no hot key seems like.
How do I get back this panel?! Thanks. (it’s on the right in the attached)
Hi there - new user here too, I hope I can be of some help.
From what I understand, the two panels (respectively on the left and right of the main 3D window) are subpanels. They can be collapsed by being dragged to the outer edges of the 3D View, and brought back by dragging on the little “+” inwards. Their default shortcuts are T and N, but of course that won’t help much if you (understandably) remapped these keys to something else.
However if you are talking about a global panel (hierarchically similar to the 3D View, the Outliner, the User Preferences window, and so on), this is different : any Blender panel can be turned into any of these by clicking on the panel type icon (For instance, for the 3D View, this icon is a little cube located at the bottom-left)
I hope this helps ! As a new user I also struggled with that concept for a while.
How to bring them back depends on how you have it set, which could be explained with one full resolution screenshot.
Default layout has 5 editors set: info (bottom of it acts as a top header), 3D view, timeline, and on the right there are outline on top and properties editor under it.
Each editor has its header and editor type can be changed from the left on that header
The manualhas a much better and in depth explanantion of the interface and the windows, screens, and editors, with illustrations and examples, than anyone could post here in little bits of advice. If you read it and don’t understand something it says, we can always try to explain it but on the whole it covers everything. Look under Starting/The interface.
incidentally this section in the manual is the one that new students skip or skim, moving on to the mesh modeling section immediately
