Читать книгу Blender For Dummies - Jason van Gumster - Страница 97

Quite possibly the most important feature in any piece of software is the ability to save and open files. Having quick access to saving and opening files was especially useful for early versions of Blender, which lacked any sort of undo function. Blender users learned very quickly to save early, save often, and save multiple versions of their project files. One beneficial side effect of this history is that Blender reads and writes its files very quickly, even for complex scenes, so you very rarely ever have to wait more than a second or two to get to work or save your project.

To save to a new file, choose File ⇒ Save As from the main header or use the Shift+Ctrl+S hotkey combination. One strange thing that you may notice is that Blender doesn’t open the familiar system save dialog that Windows, Mac, or Linux uses. This is for a couple reasons. Because Blender uses its own File Browser interface, you can be guaranteed that no matter what kind of computer you use, Blender always looks and behaves the same on each platform. And as another point, the Blender File Browser has some neat Blender-specific features that aren’t available in the default OS save dialogs.

Take a look at the File Browser shown in Figure 4-14. The header for this editor features an assortment of buttons for navigating your hard drive’s directory structure and filtering the files shown. If you’ve used the file browser that comes with your operating system, most of these buttons should be familiar to you. The options in the side region on the left of the File Browser are there to give you shortcuts to various locations on your computer’s hard drive.

The largest portion of the File Browser is devoted to actually showing files and folders. The topmost text field in this region is the current path on your hard drive to the folder/directory you’re currently viewing. At the bottom of the File Browser is the text field for the actual name of your file. In this field, type your project’s name. Pressing Enter or clicking the Save As button at the bottom right corner saves the file for you. Between the header and Current File text field is a list of the files in the current folder. Figure 4-14 shows the Blender File Browser and labels the various buttons in it.

FIGURE 4-14: The Blender File Browser.

By default, Blender pops up the File Browser as a child of the main Blender window. Although this behavior is familiar if you use other applications, it breaks the general non-blocking philosophy of the Blender interface. If you want to retain the single-window approach, you can go to the Interface section of Preferences (Edit ⇒ Preferences) and within the Temporary Windows sub-section you can set File Browser to Full Screen rather than its default of New Window.