Working in Blender - Mastering Blender - page 29

System
The System user preferences context, shown in Figure 1-24 , enables you to control a variety of display-related
and miscellaneous values.
Auto Run Python Scripts, when enabled, will allow Python scripts to be run automatically from within a
.blend file. This is convenient in some cases, but it is not recommended if you're not sure of the source of
your .blend files.
Figure 1-24 The System user preferences
The Sound buttons enable you to select sound libraries and set the amount of memory to devote to audio
mixing.
The buttons and fields in the middle column control a variety of specific values that you can adjust to im-
prove performance if you are having memory problems or you are experiencing slowdowns in your 3D view-
port. Disabling Mipmaps can speed up the OpenGL drawing in your viewport at the expense of some image
quality.
When dealing with alpha textures in an Open GL drawing, Blender creates an imperfect draw of assorted
objects.Aplanewithanalphagradientwillshowobjectsbelowitasifitweretransparent.However,objectsbe-
hind it will be “clipped” by the extent of the mesh rather than the extent of the alpha texture. When Clip Alpha
is set to .5, Blender will choose to clip by the texture whenever the alpha is less than 50%, but it also won't
showthealphagradientbeyondthat.SettingClipAlphato.995willalmostcompletely reducethealphatexture
whenever a pixel has any transparency, which is useful in certain modeling situations, and setting it all the way
to 1 is the same as setting it to 0. For accurate alpha judgments the default of 0 is preferred, but for modeling
with lots of alpha textures .5 is recommended.