[1.3a] Splitting and Joining Areas
To customize your workspace, you’re going to need to split and join areas. To do this, you need to look at the Top-Right, and Bottom-Left corners.
If you look closely at these areas, you will see that these corners have lines in.
To split an area, you click and drag one of these corners towards the middle of the current area. You will know when you are hovering over the corner because the cursor will change to a cross. So to split the 3D viewport, you click in the top right corner of it, then drag left.
After doing this, you should have two areas which both show the same thing. Now why would you want two areas that are exactly the same? Well, this is just a starting point. Now that you have the seperate area, you can change its type; pehaps you want to do some UV mapping. However, sometimes you might want two of the same area type, say if you were working on the front of a model at the same time as the side of it.
Now that you know how to create new areas, you’ll going to want to know how to get rid of old ones. You do this by merging two areas. You do this almost exactly the same way you split an area, by clicking in the corners and dragging. However, this time, you don’t want to drag into the middle, you want to drag onto another area. When you do this, an arrow will appear indicating which area is being merged onto which.
While this arrow is still showing, you can drag onto either area. To confirm the merge, you simply let go of the mouse button, and you’ll be back to only one area.
You cannot merge any two areas, they need to be next to each other, and share a dimension (same height, or same width)
So in this example, you could not merge A onto C&D, only onto B. If you wanted to merge all these areas together, you would need to merge A&B, C&D, and then merge those two resulting areas.
There is no limit to the amount of areas that you can have, you can just keep dividing and dividing.
Now that you know how to make new areas, it’s time to learn about the different area types.
Next Tutorial
The Interface – Area Types
