Saving and Modifying the viewport

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Everything below represents notes for Sepha to finish the YouTube vid and article with.

Incremental Saving

When working in Blender, you should be relying on Incremental Saving:

Every time you hit Ctrl + Alt + S, a copy of your file with an incrimented ID will be saved next to the previous file.

Make incrementally saving a habit. DCCs often crash or corrupt their project files, and while Blender is the most stable of the major DCCs, it's stability has decreased in recent years.

Incrementally saving also saves you from yourself. It is not uncommon to break or delete an asset without noticing, until you realize several minutes or even hours later, long after your Undo history can no longer save you.

By using the Append Menu:

We can easily Append assets from previous blend files into the current one, salvaging our work from older saves.

This strategy becomes less viable as the blender files become larger on disk, and so you will need to use common sense here.

Opening and Saving Blend Files

Emphasize incremental saving for project safety
Talk about File Revert

Importing and Appending Content

How to import external assets into your project
Appending vs. linking external blend files
Key point: This becomes especially relevant when working with incrementally saved files, as we can easily recover data from an older file.

Appending assets

How to append assets from old files.

Customizing the UI

Every viewport in Blender is arbitrary, and customizable. Each viewport will contain in the top right a button allowing you to switch it to any other viewport type:

Clicking this button will list all the viewports available to you:

Here you can see that I've created a very useless user interface layout, by setting every single viewport to the properties window (which is usually in the bottom right of your user interface):

Right clicking on the dividing line between any viewport will allow you to split that viewport into two, either horizontally or vertically:

When done constructively, this allows you to layout your program UI to great effect:

Here you can see I've split my viewport to see both the front, side, and perspective view all together while modeling. This is extremely powerful.

Right clicking the dividing line between the viewports also allows you to merge them back together again:

Blender by default comes with several program layouts, which are just shortcuts for you using the above process to create your own:

You can even save your layout by clicking the +.

Truthfully I never use these because I just modify my viewport on the fly, but to each their own, it's up to you.

Resetting the UI

Your user interface layout is always saved into each blender file you work on, as are your modifications to your user interface. Therefore, to reset the layout, we need to clear our layout, and save the file again.

A simple way of doing this is by opening the file without loading its UI, then saving.

Open your file: