Understanding Blender’s Interface - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 20

fill the screen. This is great when you are working on a model, and a lot of screen space is devoted to
controls and properties—you like your configuration but would prefer to have more space in which to
work. Use Ctrl-Space to fill the entire screen with the modeling window, then switch back with Ctrl-
Space again to access the original screen configuration. Remembering to use this maximization feature,
along with quick screen switching, will make your work in Blender so much easier.
A Tour of the Common Window Types
While we won't be looking at every single window type (some we'll deal with much later and some not
at all), let's take a look at the most common ones.
3D View
The dominant window when you start Blender is obviously the 3D view. It's the large workspace where
you see your 3D models. This is where you will spend most of your time in Blender. In the default con-
figuration, you are presented with a cube, a grid, and a few other objects (see Figure 2.1 ).
In addition to the main workspace of the 3D view, there are two additional pop-up elements to help you
keep things organized and useful. Figure 2.7 shows a 3D window with panels of controls on both the left
and right. The left panel is called the tool shelf . It contains commonly used tools that change depending
on what is selected in the 3D window. If you are mesh modeling, one set of tools will be present. If you
have a lamp selected, a different set of tools that are more appropriate will be presented.
The tool shelf can be shown and hidden with the T key. You will use this toggle all the time , so commit
it to memory. You can hide the tool shelf by hovering the mouse over the border between the shelf and
the 3D workspace, then LMB dragging it the whole way to the left. Clicking on the + symbol that hiding
the shelf creates in the upper left corner of the view brings it back. But you're never going to use that
method. You're going to use the T key.
At the top of the tool shelf is a control labeled Add Tool . This button brings up a search bar for finding
new tools. We'll discuss this browser later in the chapter, but for now, suffice it to say that when you are
a more experienced user, you can use this portion of the tool shelf to add custom one-button tools for
easy access.
If you end up with too many tools in the shelf and things extend off the bottom of the available area,
you can scroll the shelf by dragging inside it with the middle mouse button (MMB). You can also scroll
the contents by hovering the mouse over the panel and operating the MMB scroll wheel, or by dragging
the scroll bar on the right side of the panel.
Fundamental: Almost any non-3D window or panel in Blender can be panned and scrolled by dragging
inside it with the MMB.
The bottom of the tool shelf houses the Tweak panel . As you use tools in Blender and perform proce-
dures in the 3D view, the results of those actions will be displayed in the Tweak panel. Sometimes the
panel will show options that can be applied to the action you've just taken. For example, upon adding a