Creating multiple view tabs

- The main graph area here in Slate is called a view. And something that's in the view is not necessarily in the scene. It's not necessarily assigned to an object. It's just a staging area for creating materials. And, if you wish, you can have more than one stage. If you right-click on the View 1 tab, you'll get a pop-up menu, and from there you can do things like rename the view or delete it. You can also create a new one, and you can also create by right-clicking on an empty spot here.

Create New View. And we can give it a name. I'll just accept the default of View 2. And now, we've got another tab, and we can choose them here. We can also choose them up here, if we want, but that's kind of unnecessary, because we can just click on the tab. If I go over to View 2, I can now start dragging things in. Maybe I'll drag over another physical material. Double-click it to load it into the perimeters, and choose a preset. Let's do Rough Concrete.

And call it concrete physical. And let's load another preview. Right-click on the node for the material, and choose Open Preview Window. Then, we can of course drag that, and dock it up here. If we go over to these pull-down lists, we will see that we can only access previews for the currently active tab or view. We've got concrete listed here, but none of our wood is listed.

If we go over to view number one, then likewise this new preview lists the wood materials. If we wish, we can enable follow current selection on any one of these. And once that's done, it doesn't matter what view we're in. We will always see what's currently selected. If I go over to the View 2 tab and click on rough concrete Bitmap or concrete Physical, regardless of which tab we're in, the currently selected node will be displayed in that preview that has follow current selection enabled.

That's a basic demonstration of how you can have multiple view tabs, and you can use those for organizing your materials in various ways. For example, you might want to have one tab for all of your character materials and another for all of your architecture materials. Of course, this will get cluttered up eventually, and if you want, you can delete whatever's in here. But if it's not assigned to an object, then you'll delete all of your work. We'll look at how to work around that in a later movie.