Creating a modeling UI layout - Unity Tutorial

- [Voiceover] So in reaching this far, we have created a basic environment that is sized and proportioned as we need it to be. We've gone ahead and exported this from Blender and imported that into the Unity engine and tested that with a first person controller to test out the sizes and proportions to make sure everything is as it should be. We've established that these sizes are correct. If they weren't, we could simply take the environment back into Blender, tweak it a bit further, re-export it back into Unity, and test again. And we could repeat that process until we got the sizes correct. But we've reached a stage in which the sizes are correct. And this means we can now jump back into Blender and use a wide range of modeling techniques to refine our model even further. Before doing that, I want to tweak the Blender user interface to ensure that we get an arrangement that is optimized for our modeling workflow. You can see here inside Blender that we are using the default interface layout. And we can easily determine that this is the default layout simply by moving our mouse up here to the toolbar. And you can see in the user interface presets, we have the default layout selected. I can click on this drop-down list here to view a range of other layouts that are available inside Blender. For example, we have the animation layout which is optimized for animation. We have, for example, the video editing section which can be used in a kind of After Effects and Premiere-style application. I'm just going to go back to the default layout here. Now, the default layout is in many respects quite good, but we don't need all the features that are available, and we can tweak the interface a bit further to get a better use of our screen space. In particular, down here at the bottom, you will see we have an animation timeline. And during our modeling workflow, we're not going to be needing to use the animation features inside of Blender, so I want to effectively expand our 3D viewport into the animation area. I want to perform an additional tweak too. Now before I go ahead and customize any of this interface, I want to create a completely new user interface preset. Because if I go ahead right now and start tweaking this interface, these changes are going to be saved to the default preset, and I don't want to overwrite that. So what I'm going to do is press on the plus icon to create a new interface preset, move up here and enter a new name which is going to be CustomInterface. And I'm going to press Enter on the keyboard to accept those changes and create that new interface preset. And now when we start to tweak the Blender interface, those changes are going to be saved to this custom interface preset. So the first thing I want to do is to effectively expand this 3D view so that we can occupy the screen space that is now occupied by the timeline. To do that I'm going to move my mouse to the bottom lefthand side of the 3D view where you can see a small diagonal icon. I'm going to click on that with my mouse. And holding down the mouse button, I'm going to pull the mouse downwards over here. Actually, I've made a mistake and I've pulled this to the righthand side. And what this has done is it's created two viewports here, two duplicate viewports, and I don't want that. So I'm just going to restore that back. Now to do that, I'm going to move my mouse down to the bottom lefthand side again. Clicking on that diagonal icon, click and hold my mouse and move to the left. Now when I do that, you can see we get an arrow pointing to the left to say that the panel on the righthand side is going to expand into the one on the left. I'm going to release my mouse, and then suddenly we get our viewport back. I'm going to repeat that procedure. But this time, instead of moving left or right, I'm going to move downwards into the animation timeline. So I'm going to click and drag on the diagonal and move my mouse down. This time you can see the add arrow in the middle here pointing downwards. I'm going to release my mouse and the 3D viewport now expands into the bottom area into the timeline. And this is looking much, much better. Now the next thing I want to do is just to widen the properties panel just a little bit. So I'm going to move my mouse and just drag that to expand the size a little bit. In the bottom righthand side, I want to create a completely new and separate 3D viewport. This will allow us to see the same scene that is here, but from a different angle. This will allow me to set up reference material or images inside that viewport to allow us to model inside this main 3D viewport, and yet use the bottom righthand side one as a kind of reference. So to do that, I'm going to move up here to the top righthand side of the properties panel, click and drag downwards, and this will allow me to create a second duplicate properties panel. Now I'm going to keep this properties panel up here, but down on the bottom righthand side, I'm going to create a completely new and separate 3D viewport. So I'm going to click on this drop-down arrow here and change this from the properties panel which is what is here, the properties. And I'm going to change this to a 3D view. Now I've changed this to a 3D view, you can see that this is a view of the same scene but from the top angle. All I need to do is to use the mirestyle controls that we've seen before to rotate around to a completely different angle. And now I'm getting a view of exactly the same scene, one view here in the larger 3D view, and one view here in the smaller 3D view. And this is exactly what we needed to do. We now have the ability to set up all kinds of images of reference or other angles inside this 3D view. And these can be used as a reference while modeling in this main view. So we've gone ahead now and performed some initial tweaks to our user interface, and things are looking good.