Understanding Blender’s Interface - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 14

use anything to activate it other than the hotkey, even if you have to go searching for what that hotkey
is a dozen times.
Even if you're not the best with memorization, you will eventually become tired of poring through the
menu structure or slogging through the search bar to find it. You'll learn it by force of your own sheer
laziness, which is kind of ironically awesome.
Getting and Installing Blender
Before we actually start to look at the interface, make sure you have Blender 2.6 installed. Wait , I say,
raising a hand to forestall your objections. There is a chance that you might not have Blender 2.6 installed.
Slim, yes, but the chance exists. This topic provides equal service to all.
Blender 2.6 is available from a number of locations online, and if you're looking for the absolute latest
version, get it from the official website: www.blender.org . There's a big Download Now button on the first
page. There will be versions for your flavor of computer: Windows, Mac, or Linux. If you are already
running something from the Blender 2.5 or 2.6 series, you don't need to redownload. However, if this
topic is your irst point of contact with this great software, be sure to get Blender 2.6. That is the version
that the tutorials in this topic are designed to work with. Later versions might have small (or even large)
variances, and if you're just starting out, you'll want to keep things as straightforward as possible.
The best way to guarantee that you are using the proper version of the software for these tutorials is to down-
load Blender 2.6 from the Web Bucket for this topic, which can be found at http://www.blenderfoundations.com .
The first page of that site contains direct links to the official downloads on www.blender.org of the exact version
of the software. Windows users get a standard Windows installer. Mac and Linux users get a compressed
archive that contains the application. No need to even “install” it—just decompress and go.
The Parts of the Interface
Run Blender. Take a look. Let's dig in and dissect the first thing you see, as shown in Figure 2.1 . ( Note:
The colors in our screenshots have been adjusted for contrast, and do not reflect Blender's default theme.)
Obviously there's a lot going on in Figure 2.1 . Before we begin talking about any specifics regarding the
controls you see, you need to learn how this screen is constructed.
Blender's entire interface scheme is based on nonoverlapping windows . If you've worked with Photo-
shop (or its open-source cousin, GIMP) or basically any other graphics program, you're probably used to
having palettes flying here and there, trying to manage them so the right ones are showing and they're
not covering up any relevant portion of your artwork. Blender avoids this problem altogether by not
allowing that kind of overlap. Blender's entire display area can be split into as many subdivisions as you
like, but not one of them will ever overlap another.
Changing Window Sizes
Within Blender, each of these subdivisions is called a view or window . The borders between the different
windows can be moved by hovering the mouse over that border. When you do this, the cursor changes