Blender For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Conventions Used in This Book

As a long-time Blender user, I absolutely love hotkeys, and I use them generously in examples throughout the book. Blender makes use of nearly every key on your keyboard, so some keys are a bit difficult to put in writing, particularly punctuation keys like the period (.) or tilde (~). When I suggest that you press these keys, I do just as I did in the last sentence: I spell the symbol and then put the actual symbol in parentheses.

Blender does allow you to customize your hotkeys and mouse buttons. It also ships with some handy presets for people who may be migrating to Blender from another 3D tool. Just know, however, that if you do customize your hotkeys or use any preset other than Blender's default, the hotkeys in this book won't work for you.

I also make use of this cool little arrow () for indicating a sequence of steps. It could be a series of hotkeys to press or menu items to select or places to look in the Blender interface, but the consistent thing is that all these items are used for steps that you need to do sequentially.

Also note the somewhat peculiar way that Blender's menus work. The menus are ordered so that they flow outward from wherever you open them. For example, if a menu opens near the bottom of a window, its content will flow upward, with the first menu item at the bottom and the last menu item at the top. Throughout this book, ...