Название: Blender For Dummies
Автор: Jason van Gumster
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Жанр: Зарубежная образовательная литература
Серия: For Dummies
isbn: 9781119047131
isbn:
Figure 2-7: The Themes options in User Preferences.
File
The File options relate to how Blender works with files. Figure 2-8 shows the settings in this section of the User Preferences editor.
Figure 2-8: The File options in User Preferences.
The following list describes the important parts of this section:
✔ File Paths: Like most programs, Blender works with files. The values in this column show the default locations where Blender either places files or looks for them. Here you can indicate where your fonts are located, where you want to save your renders by default, and where to look for textures and sounds.
Probably the most important path in this section is the one for Temp. This location is where Blender stores auto save files, and it’s also where it stores the notorious quit.blend
file, which is great for recovering your last blender session. The default location for temporary files is /tmp/
on Linux and Mac OS X. On Windows, it's your user's temporary folder in C:\Users\<Your Username>\AppData\Local\Temp\
.
/tmp
directory on each boot. I can't tell you the number of people who have closed Blender without saving their work and later realized that they couldn't recover any of their work because this path wasn't properly set.
✔ .blend
file from the internet and run it in Blender, preventing potentially dangerous scripts from running right when you open the file. At the same time, this feature can prove to be quite frustrating if you don't download a lot of .blend
files from untrusted sources and you have animation rigs that rely on Python to work. If that's the case and you trust every .blend
file that you open, you can enable this check box.
✔ Save and Load: These options relate to how Blender opens and saves project files. Of these options, the two most worth knowing about are Compress File and Load UI, both of which you can modify from the File Browser, but these check boxes define the default behavior.
● Compress File: This option is handy because it makes your .blend
project files smaller when you save.
● Load UI: Load UI is short for Load User Interface, meaning that when you open a .blend
file, Blender will adjust your screen layout to match the one that was used to create that file.
✔ Auto Save: Before Blender had undo functionality, users relied heavily on its auto save features. Even in the age of undo, these options are a life saver. For that reason, the following list goes into these settings in more detail:
● Save Versions: Each time you manually save a file in Blender, it takes your last save and stores it as an earlier version. You may have already created work in Blender and noticed some .blend1
and .blend2
files in the same place you saved your .blend
files. Those .blend1
and .blend2
files are the earlier versions. This option allows you to determine how many of these earlier versions you'd like Blender to retain for you. Each version has a number appended to the end of it, so if you have MyFile.blend
and you have Save Versions set at 2, then after a few saves, you should see MyFile.blend
, MyFile.blend1
, and MyFile.blend2
all in the same folder.
● Recent Files: The number in this field tells Blender how many of your past files to remember when you go to File⇒Open Recent or press Shift+Ctrl+O. You can also use the File Browser (F1 or Ctrl+O) and look on the sidebar under the Recent heading.
● Save Preview Images: When this option is enabled, each time you save, Blender embeds a small preview image of your current screen layout, as well as each texture and material in your project, into your .blend
file. This way, you can use Blender's Image Browser to see materials and textures when you append or link from other files. Also, with this enabled, .blend
files will show these previews in your operating system's file manager.
● Auto Save Temporary Files: Enabled by default, this option is Blender's auto save functionality. It saves a copy of the current state of your file, or what I call a “hot backup”, in your Temp directory (adjustable in the File Paths options) every few minutes, as dictated by the Timer field below this button.
/home/user/Documents/project.blend
, then the absolute path to project.blend
is /home/user/Documents/
. Now say that you have a folder named textures
in the same folder as your project.blend
file, and in that folder is an image named sandpaper.png
. The absolute path to that image is /home/user/Documents/textures/
, while its relative path (relative to project.blend
) is //textures
.
System
Whereas the Interface options dictate how you interact with Blender, the options in the System section, shown in Figure 2-9, tend to dictate more how Blender interacts with you. Many options here are geared toward optimizing for performance, and generally the defaults work well.
Figure 2-9: The System options in User Preferences.
Some of the more interesting options follow:
✔
● CUDA (for NVIDIA GPUs)
● OpenCL (for AMD/ATI GPUs)
You can then choose the specific GPU from the drop-down menu.
If you don't have the kind of GPU that Cycles can take advantage of, there's no need to worry. The Compute Device defaults to None and Cycles will just use your CPU. You can read more about Cycles in Chapter 14.