I have one of those nice new Intel Sandy Bridge laptops with graphics on the processor chip and am starting to work my way through the Blender 2.5 tutorials. I have used Blender 2.4x previously but in no way actually knew what I was doing. I mostly stumbled around and occasionally got lucky. grins
So now with a sparkly new Blender and a sparkly new laptop, I though it would be a good time to actually try to learn blender more systematically and have started crawling through the tutorials found here: http://www.blender.org/education-help/tutorials/.
The first thing I encountered was my ‘laptopness’. After the “Getting Started with Blender… Interface and Navigation” tutorial I did a little test drive and found that my middle mouse button had been co-opted, which I fixed. And I found the File->User Preferences->Input and ticked the ‘emulate numpad’ setting.
My question for the community is… is this all I will need to adjust to use blender on my laptop? Does anyone have any additional suggestions?
trico
PS to the Powers That Be: You might consider adding a mention of what to do if you have a laptop to the Interface and Navigation tutorial.
I disabled touchpad because it is unusable for 3D.
Windows 7 does not have “disable touchpad when mouse is connected” so I disabled it completely:
Start/run/regedit.exe, then find “PadDisable” and set it’s value to 1. After restart, it is completely gone.
I don’t have an external mouse…and I have to disagree, I have made several models using just the trackpad (on a netbook, no less). It is less usable than a mouse, but not unusable.
One thing that I’ve found invaluable in my (limited) laptop-based blending is a USB/Firewire numpad. I have a 2010 Macbook Pro, which does not have any kind of numpad emulation. My previous laptop, a 2006 Macbook Pro, had a mode by which the right half of the QWERTY keyboard could act like the numpad while you held a modifier key – this worked, but was clunky. On the 2010 MBP, I found numpad emulation to be completely unintuitive (I know ‘rotate up’ is 8, and ‘rotate down’ is 2, but that makes no spatial sense when the numbers are in a row instead of a 3x3 grid!). I got a Microsoft Bluetooth numeric keypad, and an Arc Mouse, and have been happy so far! (combined cost, ~$80, which is a bit steep, but if you’re already paying the Apple Tax, worth it IMO).
My laptop has a HM65 chipset and graphics is enabled by that chipset as well. I have no discrete graphics, but can verify that the the sandy bridge on chip graphics is working nicely. It’s a Lenovo E420s with the i5-2410 processor.
Numpad. Enable the add-on ‘3DView: 3D Navigation’ in user prefs to “navigate the camera & 3D view from the toolshelf”.
Mucho Thanks to Demohero, uriel for this script.
Another thing I do when working on a laptop is to have the vrtual keyboard displayed. On win 7 it is called on-screen keyboard. This gives you instant access to all the keys you may not have on your laptop keyboard. It is just an overlay that is always on top, but quite handy in a pinch.
Thanks to everyone for your suggestions. I have already succumbed to getting a mouse. And will especially pay close attention to the many useful keyboard suggestions.
Dear People
Any one using HP Pavilion dv7 Note book for blender? I ask because I recently received one from my cousin and I would very much like to know if there are others who who are using Blender on it!
Blender (both the 2.4x as well as 2.5x) is unusable on this machine. Mine has Intel Integrated Graphics with Core i7 and 6GB RAM and a keyboard with numpad.
Pick up the cheapest mouse you can at a place like big lots or any discount retailer. It will do you much better than a touch pad. And most laptops now a days have a button to disable the pad from the keyboard or somewhere on the front panel
