The foams that come bundled with the Foam add-on are just the beginning. We want you to take control of your relationship with the Blender interface – which can be quite daunting at first. Even for seasoned users, Blender can sometimes hide interface elements that we need to use often. Other add-ons are great at addressing particular areas and while many of them are very configurable, they do often have a learning curve of their own. Trying to remember all this is why we built Foam.
With Foam we want to give you a way to keep all the things you need right where you expect them. To do that we want you to make your own foams.
Creating a Foam
In a 3D View or other large area, press F1 (or another key if you have changed it in Preferences) to bring up the Foam manager. If you are interested in more details, take a look at Managing Foams. For now we're just going to use the Add Foam bubble to create a new user foam.
Click on the button with the + symbol in the lower left .
In the dialog that is presented, give the new foam a name ![15]] and set the activation key to something sensible. Blender uses a lot of the keyboard already so you may need to experiment to find one that's not already in use. For now, the F2-F12 keys are a good bet. Let's pick F3 ![bubble_green_2.png|15.
You can choose which views or spaces the foam will appear in. Foams are most useful right now in the 3D Viewport but you can also have them show in any of the other view types listed in Enabled Spaces or choose All Spaces to have them show up everywhere . You might have a foam that lets you save the file and or start a render show up in any space.
For now let's leave the other options as they are. Click OK when you are ready to move on .
The new foam will be opened in Edit Mode. You will see the view is faded out and a cross is drawn in the viewport. The cross shows where the foam origin will be. By default, when you activate the foam (using F3 in this case) the foam will be displayed with the centre of the cross where your mouse pointer is.
Adding Bubbles
Now we need to add some bubbles, otherwise not only will the foam not do anything, it will be hard to tell that it's even working.
Add to Foam
The fastest way to add bubbles to a foam is to use the Add to Foam context menu item. This option is present in most right-click context menus in Blender. Some actions override the context menu and for those you may need to use a less convenient method, detailed below, to add the bubble.
Let's make our bubble kick off a new render. First open the Render Menu ![15]] and then Right-click on the Render Image item to bring up the context menu !bubble_blue_2.png . Toward the end of this menu you should see Add to Foam. Click on this ![bubble_blue_3.png|15 to add a new bubble to the foam, configured to kick off a new still image render.
Press ESC to close the foam and then again to close the manager interface. From there you can press F3 to bring up the new foam. The render bubble should be right under your cursor
Manually Configuring a Bubble
For operators or settings that don't have an easily accessible Blender UI item with a standard context menu, you can create and configure your own bubbles.
To make this a little easier it is helpful to have Blender show some developer information in its tooltips. You can enable Python Tooltips in Blender Preferences:
Notice that in the bottom left of the edit mode foam interface, the hints tell you that you can press A to add a new bubble . Do that now. A new bubble will appear at the cursor with a default configuration that opens this web page when clicked in use mode.
To make our new bubble do something interesting, we need to edit it. To bring up the editing panel, Ctrl-Click on the new bubble.
First, click on the Operator button to choose an operator. Click in the operator popup, next to the word "Operator:" to open it and type "uv_sphere". Select "mesh.primirive_uv_sphere_add". This will create a new UV sphere when clicked. You can modify the number of segments and rings and the radius of the sphere in the configuration dialog.
When Foam can figure out the icon to use for an action, it will show you the choice and select "Automatic". If you want to change the icon, and you know what you're looking for, you can choose "Custom" and pick from the drop down. Look at the next section to pick an icon graphically. If you decide that you always want the icon you picked to be used for this operator then you can click Make This the Default. Note that if you have set any parameters (such as Animation or Scene) in the operator parameters, then the default will apply when at least those settings are present in another bubble.
You can also change the bubble size, colours, icon and text placement and other settings. See Styles for more details.
When you are happy with the new bubble, click OK.
You can move the bubble around by click-dragging on it. If there are other bubbles they will snap to each other where possible. Think about what actions you want to have near the pointer when you activate the foam and cluster them around the origin cross.
Icons
Blender ships with a large number of icons. We've made most of these available for use in Foam. To change the icon displayed by a bubble, type i while your curser is over the bubble in edit mode. you will see a panel with all the available icons. You can scroll through them or start typing to narrow down the search. Pick an icon by clicking on it.
Add a few more bubbles and find some operators, tools or settings for them to activate.
When you are happy, press ESC to exit edit mode. Then click the X button in the manager to close it. Your foam should activate when you press F3. If you click on the render bubble you should get a render (depending on your system and configuration you may need to wait a few seconds for Blender to set up a render before you get control back. This is normal Blender behaviour.)
Selecting and Moving.
As mentioned above you can move the bubble under the pointer by left-click-dragging it. You can also copy, cut and paste the bubble under the pointer using the C, X and P keys respectively as described in the edit mode hints at the bottom left of the view.
In addition to operating on the bubble under the pointer, you can select groups of bubbles by Shift-clicking on them. When selected they will turn a rusty orange colour. With bubbles selected in this way you can move, copy, cut and paste them as a group. If you have bubbles selected and you click-drag on an unselected bubble then the group will move along with the unselected bubble.
Once you have started to move the bubbles you can hold SHIFT to constrain them to either the horizontal or vertical axis depending on which one is the furthest from the starting point. While SHIFT is held the bubbles will not collide with other bubbles. You can hold CTRL to stop the bubbles colliding without constraining the movement to an axis.
Alignment
Foam 0.9.0 introduces a quick alignment menu to the edit view. With at least one bubble selected, you can right-click anywhere in the foam area to open the Alignment Menu. This contains a number of options to help you organise bubbles.
Pack Bubbles
The top two buttons allow you to pack selected bubbles horizontally or vertically.
If the pointer is over one of the bubbles, then that bubble's position will be the destination of the packing - meaning that it will stay in place as the others move, otherwise the last-selected bubble will be the destination.
Align Bubbles
The second row of buttons aligns bubbles vertically and horizontally. Note that the bubbles are not packed together, leaving the same space in the other axis and just moving the bubbles horizontally or vertically.
Equally Space Bubbles
The third row of buttons in the Align menu distribute the selected bubbles horizontally or vertically. The available space between bubbles in the chosen axis is divided and assigned equally. This is done independently of the bubble's sizes so that the space is equally apportioned around large and small bubbles.
Move Bubbles to the Centre
The last row of buttons moves the selected bubbles to the horizontal or vertical centre line of the foam so that the centre of the group is on the centre line.
Related Pages: - Persistent Foams - View Locked Foams - Bubble Configuration