10 Blender Tips I Wish I Knew Sooner! Master Blender Faster!

I've been using blender for a few years now so I wanted to put together this video on 10 Things I wish I knew when I first started blender so let's jump right into it the first thing is piie or marking menus in blender you can press comma period shift spacebar Q just to name a few to get to easily accessible tools and settings there are even some in edit mode for example if I jump in here and press tab to enter edit mode you can see I was just messing with pivots ear if I wanted to reset that pivot to the global orientation I can press comma and then jump to Global if I wanted to do some actual modeling I can select a face here and you can see if I want to do something that involves face manipulation or face tools I can press contrl f for any of the context sensitive face tools so I can press extrude and there we go now even if I'm in face mode if I let's say delete this face of course I know I can fill hole and whatnot but if I wanted to get my Edge tools you can select you can go to Edge mode select your edges press contr e and so now you have all of the Edge tools which is very similar to how Maya works so once I figured out how to use this it really sped up my workflow and just for another example quick favorites is incredibly useful because I use this all the time for example I know you can go up here you can change Origins and then you can start manipulating your origins of your specific object objects if I want to skip that step I can just press shift right Mouse button and you can see I can move the cursor now while holding shift right Mouse button I can press Tab and then now I'm in snap mode and you can see I have vertex snap over here and so I've just snapped the cursor to this vertex and then I can press Q origin to 3D cursor and boom I've just moved the pivot in just a few seconds so now I can rotate about that pivot so just a quick example of how you can use all of these P menus and marking menus throughout blender all right the next one is grouping and blender or the lack of groups so what blender has is collections so you can see I have a few objects in this scene and I can put them in a collection so I can select these Primitives press M for the hot key and then do new collection and it'll automatically add these to a collection so I'll say collection one hit okay and so now anything inside of this collection can be toggled can have the visibility toggled and whatnot now the annoying thing is that this is just a scene collection meaning I cannot manipulate it inside of the viewport so if I press G to move you can see nothing is moving right so my work around for this is to put any of these objects that are in a collection inside of an empty so I'll deselect everything press shift a go down to empty and just do plain axes and so now you can see if I press alt Z I'm in x-ray mode and I can see the empty here I can select these Primitives and then make sure that the empty is the last object I have selected then I can press contrl p and then set parent to object and there we go and if I put this empty inside of that collection you'll see that everything falls inside of that empty now why do I go about it this way because if I want to let's say hide everything inside of this empty well I disabled visib visibility and you can see everything stays visible because the only thing that is hiding is the empty so you can see the eye but if I have this all in a collection then I can disable the visibility you could doubleclick on the empty like this and then hide and disable visibility that way but it's just a little bit more work than than what I'd like so I use a combination of empties and Collections and that's gotten me by so far without using any add-ons for groups so far so good it's been working pretty well next is layer toggles or restriction toggles for example if you want to go in and not only disable the visibility but you want to disable the selection the way that you can do this is if you head up top and you see this little filter icon this filter icon shows restriction toggles and there's this little Compass looking arrow and I now always have that on at the start of a project so I enable that and this creates what's called selectable or it's like freezing and unfreezing layers inside of Maya or 3ds Max so now not only do I have the r render icon the visibility icon now I have a selectable icon so I can keep these visible inside of the viewport but now I can't select them which is nice so having those things make it really easy to organize and manage your projects all right so for this next tip it's setting up an hdri in most software setting up an hdri is very similar to setting up any sort of light so you can create that as a dome light but you can see here when I first started light Point Sun spot and area there is nothing for hdri instead the way blender views hdris is the world environment which can be found here in the settings now what I'll do is jump over to the shading tab here so now we can set up our hdri so in order to do that you switch from object to world so now this is the world environment texture or the hdri texture that we're going to be using then I press shift a and do a quick search and type in environment texture not texture environment texture so I add that there and then connect the yellow pins and then I go look for my texture or hdri Texture so I have one of these studio hdris so I will select that hit open image and then I view it in the viewport now what you'll notice is the viewport doesn't change the viewport actually is just using kind of a default or preset H so if you want to now view this in the viewport change this to scene world and there you go this is the hdri or the studio hdri that we have set up then if you want to manipulate this hdri just select the studio and then you can add some transform components but I use a add-on called node Wrangler which we'll talk about in The Next Step but I press contrl T and then now I can adjust the rotation just like I would in any 3D software then if I go back to my viewport if you switch to kind of the material View and then you can show the world opacity here and then change the blur so now we can change or sorry I blurred it too much I want to reduce the blur now we can view it by using scene world and so now again it just behaves just like it would inside of my 3ds Max and and anywhere so a few extra steps but I remember having to look at this step like 10 times before it finally set in so you can also modify it again right here once you have it set up in the settings so I can change the mapping and whatnot all here directly so I don't have to keep jumping back to the shading quick Interruption if you've clicked on this video you're probably interested in 3D modeling and topology so I'm excited to announce that I'm putting together a 3D modeling topology Master Class whether you're a beginner or an advanced user this is going to help improve your skills in 3D modeling this is just the first course and trust me you're in good hands I'm an industry professional and I've been teaching for over 15 years and I have some of the most popular topology videos on my YouTube and this is going to be one of the first of many courses on my platform I'll be covering the entire 3D art pipeline starting with modeling all the way through rendering for both offline and real-time rendering so stay tuned and be sure to check out my patreon for Early Access information so I'll see you there okay so this next one is kind of a blitz of a bunch of add-ons that I use all of these are completely free and most of them can be found directly in blender as I brought up in the last tip node Wrangler is incredibly powerful there's tons of tools tools hot keys and it's a great way to speed up your material graph workflows modifier list when you have a whole bunch of modifiers on a bunch of different objects this tool does a very good job of sifting through all of your modifiers with a nice clean tool set loop tools this is one that I installed like day one because it has a lot of tools that I'm used to using like Circle which is circularize and Maya flatten relax and space all of these I use all the time so make sure to enable this right out of the gate set flow you can find this one online but it's completely free made by Benjamin solder so you can install this super quick it does a great job setting the flow of edges kind of like interpolating between two end points so instead of trying to manually create a good flow of edges this tool does it for you automatically UV Packer this one can be found online and is super helpful blender's default Packer works pretty well well but this one is free and does an amazing job utilizing as much UV space and has a bunch of tools that I regularly use especially when setting up UV maps for my game ready assets all right on to the next one which is modifying pivots I brought up earlier on how to use a 3D cursor so to recap if you hold shift right click you can move the 3D cursor anywhere and then with your object selected you can go up to the Top If you don't have this to Quick favorites and blender calls pivots origin so you can set origin and then you can do origin to 3D cursor here or if you'd like to manually modify the pivot yourself then you can go up here where it says options and then effect only Origins so now if I press shift space bar and get my move tool now I can kind of manually manipulate this anywhere in the Viewpoint and again if I turn on my snapping and I like to use vertex snapping here you can snap this to a specific vertex on your object if that's what you'd like to do and it's affecting that in real time and then you can just exit that mode and you're good to go so that's how you quickly edit pivots in blender or Origins the next one you've probably heard already but it's apply scale and I still do this to this day if I take this Cube and scale in one axis like in the y axis now if I hit end open up my panel you see that I have a scale applied now if I hit Tab and let's say I want to Bevel this corner here and I hit control B to Bevel look what happens to this bevel what it's doing now is it's it's applying that transform that we have here so it's applying that scale transform to the bevel so if we don't want it to do that then you hit a apply scale so now I'll hit the numpad Slash and if I jump into edit mode now if I bevel this now you can see this is properly beveling and then you can just scroll up on the mouse wheel and you can add a bunch of bevels compare that with that initial one and it works great or it works exactly as it's supposed to for this next tip is Edge slide and normal move so if I select Suzanne here the monkey go into edit mode and let's say now I want to adjust these edges and vertices well the way that I can do that instead of manually selecting these edges and let's say I want to just move this with my move tool and start to manually move that disabling snapping of course you know you have some control over here but if you want to slide these on the edges well you press GG as in grab and there you go and now it's sliding along edges which is really nice and what's super nice and super powerful is you see how this yellow line here it's maybe a little bit hard to see let me kind of zoom in so I'll zoom in hit GG and you see this yellow line well if I want to go past you can press C and so now it'll continue that baseed off of that tangent point which is again really really powerful and I haven't seen that in other modeling Suite so that was super nice to find out the other one is moving on normal so I can select these vertices and let's say I want to give these faces some volume right so I go in and I select some faces here and I don't really want to scale up CU I don't like the way that's that's scaling instead I can do alt s and I can start to move on the normal of the objects and you can see how it's doing a better job on adding volume so sometimes I'll use scale and sometimes I'll use move on normal so incredibly incredibly powerful all right and another tip is I had no idea until probably this past year that you can extrude only vertices so for example if I take a plane and I jump into edit mode select all of these vertices I'm going to merge them at the center then tab to exit and then G to move so now we have just this dot or this verticy here okay now I can put this back on the origin I'll put it back on the 00 origin and I'll hit numpad slash and then I'll hit tab to enter edit mode so what we can do now is we have this dot or it's our verticy and I can press e for extrude and there you go this is incredibly incredibly useful when you're creating more organic hard surface objects and I'm putting together a series of tutorials on car modeling and you better believe that I use this feature all the time time so for example what I can do is continue to extrude these vertices so I can take all of these edges now press shift d to duplicate and just move these on the Press X to move it on the x- axis great and then I can go back to kind of edge mode excuse me vertex mode and just start to manipulate these vertices here and so what we can do is Bridge these along and you can do a nice kind of bridge or Loft between these two points so one way to do that is I can select this verticy extrude and I while I'm moving I don't have snapping enabled but I can hit tab or shift Tab and snap to that verticy there I can do that again e to move this verticy press shift Tab and then snap to that vertex so now I can just select these vertices and just do a merge at Center or I can select all of them and just do a merge by distance with a pretty low distance like yeah 1 M then I can actually go in here now I have a Vertex with an edge and I can add this so now let's get on to the next tip which is grid fill grid fill is an incredibly powerful tool that I'm super happy that I found out about so I can manipulate these vertices like so and you can see I'm going to add in hopefully it's a little bit easy to see but I'm going to add in a few more vertices here and the key thing is you'll notice I kind of duplicated and moved is that you want to make sure that you have this same vertices from one side to the other in this case I just have two vertices on one side versus the other which is great so I can select all of these I have three there oh yeah so three three great so I'll select all of these vertices press crl F and go to grid fill and boom there you go and it does such a great job maintaining the curvature from the front to the end and interpolating between these and like I said you better believe that I'm going to be covering this in some car modeling series that I'll be putting together all right so those are 10 tips that I wish I knew when I first started blender so to support the channel be sure to check out the patreon where you'll get access to a bunch of my source files access to the Discord and one-on-one chats to help you grow as an artist also stay tuned because I've got a new course coming focusing on mastering topology so make sure to follow And subscribe for more information coming soon I'll see you around [Music]

Channel: On Mars 3D

Views: 3,418

Keywords: blender, blender 3d, blender tips and tricks, blender beginner, 3d, modeling, topology, how to, maya, 3ds max, cinema 4d, tutorial, ngons, ngon, tri, triangles, vfx, games, video games, tip, workflow, 3d modeling, 3d modeling blender, tips, how to model, beginner, wish i knew

Id: R0Uar4vg6SU

Length: 16min 8sec (968 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 05 2024