Understanding Blender’s Interface - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 13

Over time, and especially since Blender became open-source software in 2003, a lot of cruft has built up.
Tools have been added with little thought to how they ought to be organized. The old “buttons window”
for mesh modeling was a nightmare. But the solid, efficient core remained. In the first part of 2008 a
project began to take Blender back to its roots.
It wasn't a stripping of functionality; it was a restatement of first principles. The entire bag of features,
both old and new, were reconsidered, reshuffled, and finally given the thought they had deserved all along
but rarely received. The result is Blender 2.6.
If you have prior Blender experience, some of the higher-level stuff will stay, but prepare to blow it up
and learn it again. The good news is that you've already been exposed to the way that Blender thinks.
The new interface is like the old one, but more consistent, more logical, and more … Blenderish—which
is fantastic.
Spend the Time
Too many people have downloaded Blender because, you know, it's free and what the heck, eh? They
play with it for 15 minutes and never touch it again, figuring they should have been able to make Finding
Nemo with little effort, and finding themselves sorely disappointed. The truth is that 3D and animation are
not simple, not easy, and no one is going to become an expert without some kind of training, talent, and
dedication. It is both a craft and an art form, and like any such endeavor—metal working, carpentry, oil
painting, sculpting—you must become proficient with the tools before you can have any expectation of
producing examples that are worth showing to people who don't already dearly love you. As the Blender
Foundation's benevolent dictator for life, Ton Roosendal, has said, “You can't get a piano and expect to
be a big composer. You need to be a pianist first.”
Patiently working through this chapter and Chapter 3 (object manipulation and basic animation) will pay
dividends for the rest of the time that you spend with Blender. While Blender makes heavy use of hotkeys,
they are not essential for getting around. Any functions can be achieved in a number of ways that we will
detail later. However, the more hotkeys you commit to your fingers' memory, the more efficient you will
become. The more efficient you are, the less time you will spend fooling with the tools themselves, and
the more time you can devote to the artistic aspects of your work.
To help you make the most of your training, this topic will always provide hotkeys for newly presented
tools in boldface . If it is a common hotkey that is frequently used, the topic will speciically recommend
that you try to memorize it. Committing a hotkey to memory is a simple procedure.
The first time you encounter a tool in the text (or, say, an online tutorial), make sure to use the hotkey
that is printed with it. The next time you need to use the tool, try to remember. If you can't, that's okay.
Find the tool through another method (look it up in the topic or ind it through the menus, toolboxes,
or search function that we'll learn about in a bit), but don't actually use that other method. Anywhere
you find a tool in Blender (menu, button, etc.), simply hovering the mouse over it for a second will display
the tool's full name and any hotkeys that are associated with it. Force yourself to leave the toolbar, menu,
or search bar and just use the hotkey. Resolve that, for certain very important functions, you will never