How to Improve the Blender Experience on a Macbook or Notebook

Wed, 02/20/2008 - 19:12 — Alan

I've been using Blender on a Macbook over the last week. It was a bit of pain to start with but showed great potential.

There are some settings in the User Preferences that should help anyone with a laptop:

System/OpenGL Tab: check Emulate Numpad. This means that the numbers across the top of your keyboard are active, e.g. for camera positions. You have to imagine the layout of the numeric keypad. For instance, left is 4 and right is 6 as they would be on a numeric keypad. A bit awkward when you first try, but easy enough when you get your head around it. You do lose the ability to change layers, but that's easy enough to click on with the mouse. I spend more time navigating around the objects than I do navigating between layers.

Theme: Change the theme to Rounded. You can play with it further, same as most theming engines. I found that just selecting Rounded gave me a much better experience on the Macbook's display.

Filepaths: Specify the filepaths. I had some problems trying to find the files, especially any rendered movies. On the MacBook, it puts them some of the files your /tmp directory by default. I couldn't find them by browsing in Finder, but instead opened up the terminal to have a look around. I'm much happier having created a few folders and pointed Blender to use them. I've left the /tmp directory for the temporary files.

View and Control - Change to Select on Left Mouse. This isn't really about using a laptop, but I'm more used to pressing left button to select and right-button to select actions. The default of right-button to select was doing my head in. Changing back to the left for selection improved my productivity no end. Unfortunately, it does mean that you lose the emulate 3rd mouse button option.

I'm toying with the idea of connecting a USB keyboard or at least a USB numeric keypad to get easier access to the navigation functions. I'm sure there's more that can be done such as mapping a fews differently than the default, but that may come down to personal preferences.

If you have any other hints for using it on a laptop, let me know. I'm interested.