Blender For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

New Features in Blender's 3D View Since 2.5

In addition to the massive changes Blender had under the hood for the 2.5 series with things like the event system refactor, veterans of earlier Blender releases should notice that Blender has had quite a face-lift performed on its interface. The organization of the Properties editor, covered earlier in this chapter in the “Working with the Properties Editor” section, is just one small example. Some of the most prominent updates to Blender's interface have been added to the 3D View. This section outlines a few of these changes.

Quad View

If you've used other 3D graphics programs, you may be used to something referred to as Quad View, where the 3D View is split into four regions: top, front, and right orthographic views and a user perspective view. In former versions of Blender, re-creating this layout was a somewhat arduous task of manually splitting areas and then setting up each area as a 3D View from each of those perspectives. And worse, with no way to lock those views in place, you could very easily change one of your orthographic views to user perspective on accident. Fortunately, this situation is no longer the case. Go to the 3D View's header and click ViewToggle Quad View or use the hotkey Ctrl+Alt+Q, and your 3D View will switch to look like the one in Figure 2-15.

When toggling back to Full View from Quad View, Blender chooses ...