Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Blender 2.5x User Preferences

Saving User Preferences

Most other applications have a place to keep user-configured settings (including document defaults), separate from any actual documents the user creates. Blender works in a slightly different fashion: all your user-configured settings are saved in every document you create. Each time you create a new Blender document, it actually just reloads your default document, which is called startup.blend. To save your current state as the default document, press  CTRL + U . This will save everything you’ve done to the current in-memory document, including objects and materials created, to startup.blend. If for some reason you want to restore the default settings to how they were when you downloaded Blender, you can either delete that file, or click Load Factory Settings in the File menu.

Accessing User Preferences

You can open your preferences by selecting "user preferences" from the file menu. When you bring it up, you will see a row of buttons across the top:

These buttons select which section of your user preferences to display.

You can also choose it from the window type menu in any convenient window, since the User Preferences is a window type like any other. But if you save your preferences in this state, the next time you create a new document, it will have the preferences window open... probably not what you want.

Configuring Your Preferences

This tutorial only covers a couple of essential preferences, so you are able to get to modelling and other fun quicker. Feel free to browse through and tryout some of the preferences though, you can always restore the preferences to the factory setting if needed.

Auto Save

Here we have the Auto Save options in Blender. They are on the first screen you see in the user preferences window by default, under the File tab. Here's a brief description of each control:

• Auto Save Temporary Files - Toggle checkbox to control whether or not Blender automatically saves.
• Save Preview Images -
• Save Versions - This selection controls how many copies of one file Blender should save.
• Recent Files - This selection controls how many files total Blender is allowed to keep
• Timer - This selection controls how often files are auto-saved.

Number of Undo Levels

This is the Undo options. These options are located under the Editing tab in the user preferences window. Brief descriptions of the controls:

• Global Undo -
• Steps - This selection simply controls the number of times you can undo. How many is dependent on your system memory. For example, if you have 4 GB you might consider increasing this number.
• Memory Limit -

Numpad Emulation

The numpad emulation option located under the Input tab allows you to use the keyboard number keys (the 0-9 keys above the qwerty keys) instead of the numpad keys. This feature is especially useful if you are using Blender from a laptop and do not have a standard numpad.