 Workspaces are customizable groups of panels or editors that can be used for specific workflows. Blender comes with predefined workspaces that can be found in the tabs at the top. These are labeled as Layout, Modeling, Sculpting, UV Editing, Texture Paint, Shading, Animation, Rendering, Compositing, Scripting, and an option to add your own. If you can't see all of the tabs, just know that you can use scroll wheel or middle click drag to show more. Simply left click any of these tabs to switch to them and you'll notice they look different. The modeling workspace is used for creating models by manipulating vertices directly. This is why you'll notice that the vertices or corners of your mesh are now selectable. That's because the modeling workspace automatically brings you into edit mode instead of object mode, as you can see in the top left hand corner of the viewport. You can change into edit mode in any workspace viewport by changing the value of this dropdown menu or pressing the tab key. But the modeling workspace tries to make itself as convenient as possible for you to get started modeling. It also removes the timeline as modeling typically does not require any animation. The sculpting workspace is similar to the modeling workspace but is used for creating models by manipulating meshes with a brush. Sculpting is a more freeform method of creating models and typically results in higher polycounts not usable for animation. However, it is a great way to start your creation process to then re-optimize your mesh later on. This workspace automatically puts you into sculpt mode, which is also accessible through the same dropdown menu in the top left hand corner. However, there is no hotkey for this mode. The UV editing workspace is used for editing your UV projection maps, which is another way of saying, I skinned this object and stretched its skin across a flat surface. Anyway, this is a very handy tool for texturing your objects as textures must be represented in 2D but projected onto a 3D object. You can see the 3D viewport on the right with an object corresponding UV map on the left. If there was an image linked to this UV map, that image may become visible on the 3D object on the right hand side, which would show you visually how the 2D texture has been projected. Texture paint is probably what some of you were thinking when I mentioned the complexity of UVs. Why paint on a 2D surface and project that to a 3D surface when you can simply paint on the 3D surface directly like painting an Easter egg? Well, in this case, you can paint any object like an Easter egg. With texture painting, you can paint directly onto the 3D object, and Blender will project your paint to texture onto a 2D surface based on the UVs. The shading workspace is a very important workspace used for manipulating materials, particularly with node-based shaders. The workspace puts your viewport into look dev mode, showing you in real time what your shaders would approximately look like at render. You can also access this from any viewport window using these buttons here. For hotkey users, simply press Z and use the Pi menu that appears. If you want a more accurate display of your shader, you can also change it to rendered mode. If you play around with the numbers in the node editor below, you'll be able to see some changes in real time in the viewport above. It also includes an image editor and file explorer for any necessary image files. The animation workspace is catered specifically for animators to have all the tools they might need. The 3D viewport is where most of the animation will happen, but the dope sheet, which looks similar to the timeline, will be where all of your keyframe manipulation happens. You may also notice that there is a sliver of the timeline editor below the dope sheet. That is simply to provide all the playback options, start and end frames, and keyframe navigation buttons the dope sheet does not have. For example, you can click this circle slash record icon to start automatically recording changes in your object's location, rotation, or scale as keyframes for animation. The camera view on the left is also a 3D viewport panel, but focused on the camera's perspective. This is great for getting an idea of what the animation will look like at render. Now there may be some of you who are wondering where the graph editor is. If you want to use the graph editor, simply create a new panel and select graph editor from the editor options in the dropdown. However, the dope sheet is so powerful with keyframe manipulation compared to other 3D animation software that the graph editor is not used nearly as often, but it can still be useful. The rendering workspace is used for testing or finalizing the output of your file. If you had a recent render, it'd likely be displayed here. It's important to note that this is the same image editor that we see in other workspaces. However, the image selected is render result, giving you access to slots, which serve as great temporary render test comparisons. These slots are accessible both through the top right dropdown, as well as the right hand side quick menu pulled up with the N hotkey under image. For hotkey users, you can use J to toggle between the most recent two slots or use any of the numbers on the number row to go to a specific slot corresponding to that number. The compositing workspace is used for post processing and after effects that would add beautification to your renders, such as glow, blur, masks, etc. The compositor in Blender is node based and is very similar to the shader editor in the shading workspace, but has its own editor in the dropdown menu. In order to start using the compositor, simply check use nodes at the top here. This will automatically generate a view layer node and a composite node. The composite node is simply the end result receiver, your final output. And the view layer node represents how you can use view layers to combine different passes, such as character and background in this compositor. Now you may notice that there is a dope sheet provided at the bottom, which is Blender's keyframe manipulator for animation. So why is it here? Well, let's say you're doing an animation where you want one particular part of the animation to have heavy directional blur because the camera is moving fast, but you want to turn it off after a certain point. In this case, you'll want to keyframe your blur property. The dope sheet is provided to help you keep track of those compositor specific frames. The scripting workspace is for those instances where we might have to write some code. The text editor is very flexible. It can load and save files externally, enable syntax highlighting, enable word wrap, enable word lines, and a number of other useful coding tools. It can also provide easy to set up templates for common Blender script functions, such as UI elements or gizmos. You'll notice there's also a console panel provided on the left. This is for seeing error messages at runtime. And at the bottom we have what's called the info panel. This is a list of recent operations that have been performed by Blender, which usually correspond to actions the user has taken somewhere in the software. For example, if you select an object in the 3D view board and transform it, you'll notice a new line appear in the info panel. You can copy and paste these operations onto your text editor for reference on how to use certain functions. And finally we have our create new workspace option. This will bring up a few options, but you'll notice many of them are grayed out. This is simply because they already exist in your tabs. However, you can select duplicate current, which is a great way to start customizing your own. Simply duplicate the workspace and double click the tab to rename it to whatever you like. If you'd like to bring a certain workspace to the beginning of the list for easy access, you can right click the tab and choose reorder to front. You can also remove workspaces from the list by right clicking and selecting delete. Keep in mind that if you delete a custom workspace, it will be lost forever. In order to save a custom workspace, I recommend setting up a custom startup file by opening up a new file, setting up your workspace, and then going to file, defaults, save startup file. Your workspace will then be included in every new blender file you create. However, while you are looking through the new workspace options, you may have noticed that there are a few workspaces in the creation options that we haven't seen yet. We may go over these in another video, but I highly recommend looking into the strengths of Blender's 2D animation capabilities, as well as its powerful VFX and motion tracking capabilities. And that's the general summary of how workspaces work. We'll be going over specific workspaces in more detail in their separate videos.