let me show you an extremely powerful hidden feature within blender called
app templates this gives you the ability to have multiple user preferences add-on setups ui layouts
custom scripts on startup and even your own splash screens let's get straight into this
first and foremost the blender documentation is linked down in the description as well now don't
be scared by it there's not a lot of changes we have to do at all this is very much a default
blender i just need to show you where things live the blender documentation is brilliant if you get
stuck and especially if you're talking about running custom scripts on startup there's a
lot more information in there than i'm going to be able to provide in this video with that said let
me show you where things live where we're going to be changing things up adding things and just
getting to grips with where everything lies when we're playing around with our app templates so
you might be like me and you have blender set up in a very particular way for your workflow
right now for instance i have everything set up in millimeter scaling my ui is quite big
and bulky so that it comes across well in video i have a whole bunch of add-ons plus i have a
whole bunch of shortcuts done as well so the key thing that we need to understand
is where exactly are these preferences saved and what exactly is the relationship of this new
file structure right here well to understand that we need to head over back to the documentation
and that is linked down in the description it's this page right here which is the configuring
directories there's the local user and system and the only one we're interested in is the user one
because the system and local one we usually don't really want to play around in there so windows
you're there mac you're there linux you're there remember linked down in the description and now
i'm going to show you windows users how to get there we're going to type in run we're going to
put in percent app data percent because it is a hidden folder it's going to be inside of your
app data roaming and here it is blender foundation blender 3.0 and now everybody else should have the
exact same file structure at this point now very quickly i want to show you where the wrong place
looks like and that is right here you do not want it to look like this you can see there's a big
difference inside of here you have 3.0 and you'll have scripts very much now starting to go back
into that way now the reason why i brought this up is because i also want to show you if we go
to scripts we have this startup file here and then we have this bl app template system because we are
in the system directory here and inside of here you're going to see 2d animation sculpting and all
that and that looks very familiar because that is the file new structure right in there so let's go
into one of those and see what's going on inside of here there's a file called startup and there's
this nist file or an init file and this has a couple of extra little things as well that we'll
cover but now that we know the structure it is bl underscore app template system we need to create
the same thing now just before we do that i want to do a backup of something very important right
here we have this config folder inside of here you have this startup and this user preferences
these are your user preferences that you've worked so hard to create and this startup file
is actually the startup file when you go here in defaults and save startup file that is that
startup file so i'm going to grab both of these i'm going to copy them i have a little folder
here called backup and i'm going to paste those in there because i actually need my user preference
file as a backup later on okay now that i've done that let's go back to 3.0 let's go into scripts
and you'll see there's no startup folder so let's create that so startup folder sorted
next up we're going to go inside of here and now we're going to do bl underscore app underscore
templates underscore user now that we've created this we're going to go inside once again
and we're going to create another folder now this can be your first
whatever structure you want to create i'm just going to call this
test for now and inside of here i'm going to grab my backup i'm gonna copy these two
and i'm gonna paste that in there now what's great about blender is that this is
instantaneous if we go over to file new you will see test right there so if we click on test
don't save there is no need to now we have a test exactly as we want it you'll see it set
up in my millimeter unit scaling because it's using everything that i've set up
before so i'm going to change this file to be what i want it to be so i want this to be
one unit scaling i also want this to be back into meters i also want to change my grid scaling
here back to one and then the really big change that i want to do is i want to go back to edit
preferences put everything back to load factory preset bam big change there and
you see here save preferences there's a little star because it hasn't saved so let's click that
to make sure that those are saved in place now that i've done this i need to save this file as
well so i'm going to go file save as and on my desktop i'm going to save this file as start up
so that is going to be my startup right there this is going to be my quote classic version of
blender so now that i've done that inside of here we have our test file so i'm going to go back here
to this startup and user preferences i'm going to delete those not cut delete them thank you
this startup file i'm going to put that inside of test and then i'm going to go
all the way back to 3.0 in that config there's that user preferences that i've just overwritten
so let's copy that i'm going to go back to 3.0 back into my scripts back into the startup back to
the users back to the test and paste that in there now i want to have my old preferences as well when
i'm usually using blender so i'm going to go back to my config here inside of my backup i'm going to
grab that user preferences i'm going to make a copy of it delete the user preferences that are
there right now and paste my old preferences back in there now i'm going to close all of this it is
instantaneous you don't need to restart blender but i like to just close blender completely
and restart it once again and now you'll see that everything should be back to normal back to the
settings that you had it before so my unit scaling a whole bunch of add-ons everything's there for me
but now i can go into file test and everything goes back to default for me so this here
no add-ons back to unit scaling everything's back so what else can you do with this well if you look
at the documentation it tells you you can do a lot more now i've already gone and created
a whole bunch of these you'll see i have my new start up here bl touch whatever and i have here
my 3d print design one my classic one my video one precision modeling and terrain generator
so i'm going to copy all of these i'm going to put these inside of my app data roaming file
so scripts start up my user one i'm going to delete this test file paste in all those new
ones and just give you a little guided tour of what's going on in here but just before
i do that you might have noticed that in that intro bit there are these two shortcuts as well
so these shortcuts you can see one goes to empty videos and the other one goes terrian how do i do
that well when you go into the properties of this you can add a little command line
right here i'll just zoom in for you so you can see what's going on and all you have to put in is
dash dash app data sorry app dash template space and then put in whatever the file name
is that you're trying to activate and that will basically open it up in that way so
my maker tales one when i double click it you'll see it will open up and not only that but i have
a custom splash screen right there for it let me just show you how that's done you'll see when i
created these inside of here you'll see that i have my MT videos there is this
splash photo right here and it just needs to be a particular size it's in the documentation
it is 1000 pixels by 500 pixels chuck that in there png with a splash and that's in there
again you can see it has a user preference and a startup that i've put in for this one now
just before we jump to the next one i want to show you inside of my terrain gen we have this
startup the user preferences a splash and this ini this file is just created automatically
this here is the init file inside of this file i've added a little bit of code and inside of
this code i've added basically create a plane give it some subdivision modifier
give it a nice little displacement modifier and on top of that create a texture and randomize the
noise scale and the contrast register that into the startup and unregister that and trust me i
know it sounds complicated but it isn't it's just a little bit of code that you can get into if you
want and eventually i will be doing videos on that so feel free to subscribe for when they come out
so because i've done that when i click on my terrain generation one
i get my lovely little splash screen plus i get some randomly generated terrain so if i go control
n for a new file and click terrain gen you'll see that every single time i click it it will generate
something different every time and that there is pretty much the power of app templates you
can take this like i've done i've created a 3d printed one where i've got an entire scene here
with a 3d printer and a volume indicator to show you myself what i can print on this i also have
another one for my videos as you've already know this the default one that i use that has
all my add-ons it's everything's in millimeters i also then have my classic one which is basically
everything off so all the add-ons are off everything's back to factory reducer
resets and i also have my scale back to meters and there you have it i hope that opened up the
world of possibilities that there's available with app templates in blender if you found it
a little bit complicated and you need some help remember that we have a discord that's linked
down in the description and the documentation trust me there is so much information there
that's probably going to be the best place possible but we are there as a community to
help all each other out a huge thank you to my patrons you guys are absolutely awesome
and without you i wouldn't be able to make maker tales and if you're enjoying what i'm making here
you think i'm worthy of your support i would love to see you there too remember we have that discord
and it's linked down in the description thanks for watching keep making and let the quest continue