From BlenderWiki

Outliner window

Description

The Outliner window is used for easily navigating a complex scene. There are two views, the Outliner view and the Oops Schematic view. The Oops Schematic and Outliner give you a 2D representation of your complicated 3D world. Use these views to find things in your scene.

For example, suppose you sneeze while moving an object; your mouse flies off your desk (gesundheit!) and the object is hurled somewhere off screen into space. Simply use the schematic/outliner to find it; select it, and move back to your 3D window to snap it back to your cursor (⇧ ShiftS → Selection -> Cursor).

Another more practical example is to evaluate the impact of a change on related datablocks. Suppose you are looking at your TableTop object, and it doesn’t look right, the Wood material doesn’t look right; you want it to look more like mahogany. Since the same material can be used by many meshes, you’re not sure how many things will change color when you change the material. Using the Oops Schematic, you could find that material and trace the links that it has to every mesh in your scene.

Outliner view

The Outliner is a kind of list that organizes related things to each other. In the outliner, you can:

• View the data in the scene.
• Select and deselect objects in the scene.
• Hide or show an object in the scene.
• Enable or disable selection (to make an object “unselectable” in the 3D Views).
• Enable or disable the rendering of an object.
• Select data like materials and textures directly (they show up automatically in the Buttons window!).
• Delete objects from the scene.
• Unlink data (equivalent to pressing the X button next to the name of a datablock).
• Easily select which render layer to render.
• Easily select which render pass to render (for example, you can choose to render just the Specular pass).

Oops Schematic view

The Oops Schematic is a kind of picture that shows how things are linked together. “Oops” is a highly geeky term for “Object-Oriented Programming System”. In the Oops view, you can:

• Look at relationships between objects (for example, which objects use the same texture).

The main difference is that the Oops Schematic shows you all available things (datablocks) in your blend file, organized by type of thing: scenes at the bottom, objects in the middle, materials toward the top. The Outliner shows you things in use within your blend file, organized by parent object with their children as indents.

Selecting the Outliner Window Type

Turn a window into Outliner type.

The Outliner window in Outliner mode.

Choose a window and click on its current Window type button (left-most icon in its header), and select Outliner.

Switch between the Outliner view and the Oops Schematic view using the menu item View → Show Oops Schematic or View → Show Outliner.

Window size Choose or arrange a window size that suits the view you are going to work with. The Oops Schematic needs a wide window, and the Outliner needs a tall, narrow window.

Using the Outliner view

Each row in the Outliner view shows a datablock. You can click the down-arrow to the left of a name to expand the current datablock and see what other datablocks it contains.

You can select datablocks in the Outliner, but this won’t necessarily select the datablock in the scene. To select the datablock in the scene, you have to activate it.

Selecting and activating

Single selection doesn’t require any pre-selection: just work directly with LMB (and/or RMB - contextual menu, see below) inside the name/icon area.

When you select an object in the list this way, it is selected and becomes the active object in all other 3D Views. Use this feature to find objects in your 3D View, select them in the Outliner, then zoom to them with . NumPad or if you don't have a numpad, snap and center your cursor on them via ⇧ ShiftS → Cursor -> Selection, and then C.

Activating a datablock

Activate the datablock with LMB on the icon or the name of the datablock. Activating the datablock will automatically switch to the relevant mode or Buttons context. For example, activating the mesh data of the cube will select the cube and enter Edit mode (see right). Another example is that activating the material datablock for the cube will show this material in the Shading context, Material sub-context of the Buttons window.

Toggle pre-selection of a group of datablocks

Useful when you want to select/deselect a whole bunch of datablocks. For this you must prepare the selection using, to your liking:

• RMB or LMB ,
• ⇧ ShiftRMB or ⇧ ShiftLMB ,
• RMB and drag or LMB and drag,

all outside the name/icon area. Those pre-selected have their line in a lighter color.

You then can (de)select them with a RMB on the name/icon area, which brings on a context menu (see bellow).

Context menu

Show the context menu for a datablock with RMB on the icon or name. Depending on the type of the pre-selected datablock(s), you will have all or part of the following options:

• Select.
• Deselect.
• Delete.
• Unlink – To unlink a datablock from its “owner” (e.g., a material from its mesh).
• Make Local – To create a “local” duplicate of this datablock.

Note: some datablock types will not have a context menu at all!

Deleting a datablock

Use X to delete the selected datablock(s).

Expanding one level

Use + NumPad to expand one level down in the tree-list.

Collapsing one level

Use - NumPad to collapse one level up in the tree-list.

Expanding/collapsing everything

Use A to expand/collapse all levels of the tree-list.

Toggling object-level restrictions

The three following options, in the right side of the Outliner window, are only available for objects:

Visibility

Toggle visibility by clicking the “eye” icon for the object on the right-hand side of the Outliner. Useful for complex scenes when you don’t want to assign the object to another layer. This will only work on visible layers - an object on an invisible layer will still be invisible regardless of what the Outliner says. V will toggle this property for any objects that are pre-selected in the Outliner.

Selectability

Toggle selectability by clicking the “arrow” icon. This is useful for if you have placed something in the scene and don’t want to accidentally select it when working on something else. S will toggle this property for any objects that are pre-selected in the Outliner.

Rendering

Toggle rendering by clicking the “camera” icon. This will still keep the object visible in the scene, but it will be ignored by the renderer. R will toggle this property for any objects that are pre-selected in the Outliner.

Searching

You can search the file for datablocks, either by using the Search menu in the header of the Outliner, or by using one of the following hotkeys:

• F - Find.
• CtrlF - Find (case sensitive).
• AltF - Find complete.
• CtrlAltF - Find complete (case sensitive).
• ⇧ ShiftF - Find again.

Matching datablocks will be automatically selected.

Filtering the display

The window header has a field to let you select what the outliner should show in the outline. By default, the outliner shows All Scenes. You can select to show only the current scene, datablocks that have been selected, objects that are on currently selected layers, etc. These selects are to help you narrow the list of objects so that you can find things quickly and easily.

• All Scenes - Shows everything the outliner can display (in all scenes, all layers, etc.)
• Current Scene - Shows everything in the current scene.
• Visible Layers - Shows everything on the visible (currently selected) layers in the current scene. Use the layers buttons to make objects on a layer visible in the 3D window.
• Groups - Lists only Groups and their members.
• Same Types - Lists only those objects in the current scene that are of the same types as those selected in the 3d window.
• Selected - Lists only the object(s) currently selected in the 3D window. You can select multiple objects by ⇧ ShiftRMB -clicking.
• Active - Lists only the active (often last selected) object.

Example

The outline example shows that the .blend file has three scenes: “Ratchet in Middle”, “Ratchet on Outside”, and “Ratchet Out White”. By clicking on the little arrow to the left of the name, the outline is expanded one level. This was done for the “Ratchet in Middle” scene. As you can see, this scene has some “World” material settings, a “Camera”, an “Empty”, a “HandleFixed” object… All objects that were added to the scene.

By clicking the arrow next to “ratchetgear, we can see that it has some motion described by the “ObIpo.001” curve; that it was based on a “Circle” mesh, and that it is the parent of “HandleFixed.002”, which is in turn the parent of “Plane.003”, and so on.

The neat thing is: if you select any of these datablocks here, they will be selected in the 3D (or Buttons) window as well as far as this is possible. Pressing * NumPad with your mouse cursor in any 3D Window will center and align the view to that object. Very handy. Also, pressing X will delete it, as well as all the other hotkeys that operate on the currently selected object.

Using the Oops Schematic

Layout of the Oops Schematic

In this view, the window has a clear background that, by default, shows the Oops Schematic and a header:

Outliner window in Oops Schematic mode. A) OOPS Schematic, B) Menu, C) Zoom, D) Display Select, E) Currently selected datablock.

The Oops Schematic window & header have the following areas:

A) The schematic picture.

B) Menus with the basic functions: View, Select, and Block.

C) A zoom control that allows you to focus on a certain area of the schematic.

D) Visible Select - a number of buttons that toggle what kinds of datablocks are displayed in the schematic.

E) The name of the currently selected datablock. The datablock is also highlighted in the Oops schematic (A).

Making sense of the Oops Schematic

The schematic is a sort of map that shows the connections between datablocks. Each datablock is shown as a colored box. Boxes (datablocks) are connected by lines. Common types of connections between datablocks are:

Parents

One datablock, let’s say an object called “TableTop”, is held up by four other objects “leg.001”, “leg.002”, etc. The TableTop would be the parent of each of the legs, so that as the table top moves, the legs move as well. In the schematic, four lines would be shown going from the TableTop to each of the Legs.

Material Use

Datablocks can share the same material. In our table example, the TableTop and each of the legs might share the same material, “Wood”, so that they all look the same. In the schematic, there would be a box called “Wood” with five lines connecting it to each of the mesh datablocks TableTop, Leg.001, Leg.002, Leg.003 and Leg.004.

The schematic uses different colored boxes for each type of datablocks, to help you visually distinguish between them:

• Grey-green for scenes.
• Grey for objects.
• Olive green for groups.
• Purple-grey for meshes, curves, surfaces, metas, texts.
• Beige for armatures.
• Purple for lattices.
• Greyish yellow for lamps.
• Pink for cameras.
• Sea green for materials.
• Salmon pink for textures.
• Orange for images.
• Blue for Ipos.
• The datablocks linked from a library file have a small colored square.
• The non-linked datablocks became uncolored (transparent background).

The Oops Schematic Header

View

Handy functions include switching between the schematic and outliner view. Also, you can change the size of the boxes, so more can fit in the window.

Select

Key functions include finding users and links between connected boxes.

Block

Scales (S) the distance between multiple selected datablocks, and grabs/moves (G) a datablock or set of selected datablocks around the schematic - very useful for arranging and organizing your schematic.

Zoom controls

As you can imagine, depending on what you have selected and your scene complexity, these schematics can start looking like the piping diagram for a nuclear power plant. The schematic header provides two buttons to help you zoom in.

• button: hold down LMB over this button and move your mouse up and down (forward and backward) to zoom your view in and out.
• button: click on this button to start a border select. Select a region in the window, and your window view will be zoomed to that region.

Standard Window Controls Like in any Blender window, you can also zoom in/out with WheelUp /WheelDown , or click and drag CtrlMMB . You can pan it to, with a click and drag MMB for exemple.

Visible Select

The series of icons in the header allow you to select what type(s) of datablocks (see this page for more details about datablocks) are visible in the schematic. They are, left to right:

• - Only show the datablocks from the shown layers.
• Scenes - Your stage, a set, where action occurs.
• Objects - All Objects datablocks.
• Meshes - The main things you model, not to be confused with objects. E.g. one Mesh can be used in multiple objects and is displayed accordingly in the schematic.
• Curves, Surfaces, Texts - The “real” data of parametric objects.
• Metaballs - Mathematically calculated meshes that can mush together, as a fluid in zero-G.
• Lattices - Deformation grids.
• Lamps - All types of lights.
• Materials - Colors, shading…
• Textures - Color maps or gradients used commonly in materials and other places.
• Ipos - All animated settings (positions, rotations, colors, …).
• Images - All images loaded in Blender, as a texture, in the VSE, …
• Groups - The groups of objects.
• Libraries - Collections of objects.
• Cameras - The “eyes” of the Blender.
• Armatures - The skeletons of your characters.