100 Blender 2.8 tips you might not know! (Blender 2.8 tips and tricks)

so you know how you watch a blender video and usually pick up maybe one or two blender tips and tricks that you actually use for a long time well the title is not clickbait i actually went through dozens of hours of content to find a hundred blender tips and tricks for you today yes this took an insane amount of time so please share and support so that more people will be able to see this starting us off with tip number one is dragging and dropping materials did you know that if you select an object go into the materials tab click on this material icon right here and drag it and drop it onto another object it will actually apply that material onto the object don't you hate when you have to go in and adjust parameters individually especially on things like lamps now you do not have to because you can set one and select all of the others and then select the one and right click and choose copy to select it now we'll copy that exact data value onto every other object you have selected with that parameter available i know it's fun to delete the default cube only to add it back every time but what if you want to save yourself some time and skip this step well i've got news for you you can actually delete everything go to file defaults and save startup file if you click this that means that this will be your default starting scene instead of a cube lamp and camera you could actually change this to be whatever you want if you want to start with a default monkey from now on you could choose the monkey drop it in go to defaults and save startup file if you want to make a knife cut that passes through an object all you need to do is go into knife mode with k and press the z key and then make your cut whatever it is just make it press enter and it will cut through to the other side perfectly so there's no more guessing alternatively if there's a cut that you want to make that is completely straight that needs to pass through the object all you have to do is select the faces you want to cut go to mesh press bisect and then click and drag and make your cut as you can see it's affected the entire object here but i could just select the faces that i want to affect such as these go to mesh bisect and make the cut and it won't hurt any of the other geometry it'll just cut out what you aimed for press control space bar to maximize or restore any window need the 3d view it's right there need the shader editor well that's right there need the graph editor that's down here how about the video sequencer that's sandwiched right up here seriously try this one out it feels awesome want to generate cool iv structures like this in literally seconds here's what you're going to do go to edit preferences add-ons and search ivy then enable iv gen add-on x out or save preferences if you want to keep this on x out and then click to put the 3d cursor somewhere on your model and then go into the end tab go down to create and here you'll find a tab that says iv generator open this up and then select the object that you want to add iv to in this case it's a monkey so i'll place some iv on the underside here i'll place the 3d cursor on the bottom with the monkey selected and then i'm going to mess with the settings a little bit the one that you need to care about is max iv length i'm going to slide it to 2 instead of 1 and i'm going to click add new ivy and immediately it's going to be not colored but if you create colored materials for the leaves and the stems you can make them have color just like all the other ones and show it off to all your friends now clearly this isn't very realistic but it looks cool if you want to make it more realistic what i would suggest doing is creating an alpha mask texture of a leaf and then substituting that in the leaf material and then also using a texture for the stem material plenty of settings here feel free to go crazy now this next tip is a pretty quick one but i'm sure it'll save you some time if you want to reset the value of any parameters such as a location rotation a node value all you have to do is hover over that value and press the backspace key just like this you can just scroll your mouse around and it'll reset everything to how it was the same thing goes even for add-ons if you've messed up all the settings for your ivy generator for example you can just hold backspace and scroll over everything and it'll set everything back to the way it was and for tip number nine alternatively if you want to reset either the position or the rotation of an object you can go alt g for the position and alt r for the rotation and tip number 10 if you're a beginner i'm about to save you some time if you're an experienced user i'm about to save you your life so right click a face that you want to select and never again do shift right click like this instead right click and then control right click where you want it to go and blender will find the shortest selection path to that area it's super convenient i only found this out just recently which is embarrassing but it's incredibly useful and i'm surprised to see that a lot of people don't actually know about that blender has a few different kinds of spheres but it turns out that the best kind isn't even a sphere at all it's a cube if you go into a cube and add a subdivision surface modifier and crank up the subdivisions you'll end up with something that resembles a sphere except it has all quad topology making it ideal for sculpting and modeling but on that note have you ever seen these material spheres for display materials and never been able to achieve this look well that's because they're not actually using a sphere at all they're using a uv sphere tilted 90 degrees and cut in half here i'll show you how to do it simply add in a sphere rotate it in 90 degrees on the x-axis make sure that one of the points is facing the direction of the camera and then go into orthographic view go into wireframe mode deselect everything by pressing double a then press b to open box select and click and drag over all these vertices next click x delete vertices and perfect now to unwrap it all you have to do is go into another orthographic view press l to select all the linked faces and then press u project from view now you've got the texture in your uv editor and you can just scale it up to wherever you need it to be on the uv are you a fan of zbrush's gradient background well you can create that blender as well just go to edit preferences themes 3d view all the way down to theme space and grading colors and check use gradient now you can change which colors you want the gradient to be for instance i could make it red to gray or i could make it green to gray whatever you prefer tip number 14 is another modeling one if you want to bevel an edge or a face all you have to do is just press ctrl b but if you want a bevel of vertex all you have to do is press ctrl shift and b and you can use the same controls such as scrolling the mouse wheel to add additional vertices most people know that if you press e you can extrude faces however when you're trying to do multiple at once it just doesn't work however did you know that if you press alt e you'll get options for this you can either extrude faces or extrude individual faces such as this another trick is to use alt e extrude along normals and then you'll get this effect right here by pressing the f key you can fill a face anywhere but you can also press the f key to connect two vertices or edges however you'll notice here that this is going to cause something weird to happen where it's not actually connected to the face because there's something else in the way if you want to avoid this you can press j instead and it will fill between the vertices but it will connect it to the face and whatever lies between this next tip is about edge sliding if you press the g key you can move any edge or any vertex or face however you want but if you press g twice it'll move only along the adjacent edges the same works for vertices too just press g twice and it will move along wherever the dotted line is pointing this next tip which is actually more of a resource is called 3dscans.com it's pretty underused it's got some pretty good photo scan sculptures and they're fun to mess around with you can click any one of them and download the scan and they're fun to mess around and create materials with and all sorts of things if you've got an object behind another object you can alt right click on that object and then select which object you'd like to select this way even if you've got hidden objects all over the place all you need to do is alt right click in approximately the right direction and then choose which one you need now this is where it would be very helpful to name your objects inner cube big cube and medium cube now if i alt right click i can choose which one i want to select now this next one is one that you should know but you probably don't use as much as you should it's expanding string selection with control and plus on the number pad and control and minus on the number pad it's an incredibly powerful way to start anywhere and just start selecting out from there and it is definitely underused considering how powerful it is want to make a checkered floor subdivide a plane a bunch of times select everything go to select and checker deselect to deselect everything in a checkered pattern now you can do with that what you like tip number 22 did you know that if you select all of your nodes and press f it will automatically connect them nifty and speaking of nodes did you know that if you hover over the color box of any color parameter and press the e key it will open up an eyedropper that you can use on any image or really anywhere in the scene this has got to be the most convenient thing ever my next tip for you is to use adobe mcsammo if you have an adobe creative cloud subscription it basically is a collection of like 2 500 free mocap animations just as long as you're an adobe subscriber and they've got just tons and tons of really really good motion captured animations i definitely recommend you check it out if you're looking to animate some characters they will also give you free characters they have a library of those as well and if you upload your own character that's not rigged they will rig it for you automatically for free number 25 is that this what i have selected right here is a vertex not a vertice the pluralist vertices but the singular is vertex just trying to save you some flack here's a modeling trick that every blender artist should know about it's called proportional editing if you subdivide something a lot of times or if it already has a lot of subdivisions you can enable this proportional editing by either clicking the o key on the keyboard or clicking this icon up here but essentially what it will do is as soon as you've made a transformation it will not only affect whatever you've selected but also everything around it based on the falloff that you specify right now it's a smooth falloff but i could change it to maybe a random falloff you can choose to do it in a projected from view version such as this where it's using my view to determine not the geometry itself and there's just a lot of options here and it allows you to make some really nice organic looking geometry in almost no time something else you may not be aware of is that in these long lists you can actually just press ctrl and hover over it and then scroll your mouse wheel and it will cycle through the options for you that way you can focus on looking at the changes and not the menu speaking of quick shortcuts if you're in edit mode and you want to switch between vertex edge and face mode you don't have to click up here that's nonsense all you have to do is press one two and three on the keyboard respectively just as long as you don't have emulate numpad turned on another fun add-on is cell fracture if you go up to edit preferences and enable cell fracture you can actually go into the space menu or your whatever your search hotkey is go to cell fracture selected mesh objects click it and then you can copy my selections here or you can just mess around with your own settings and then you can click ok and then it might take a little bit and once it's done just delete the outliers if you want to delete the shell and then you've got this pretty cool effect you can even select everything and then go down to individual origins and scale those in and now you've got this really insane effect and now you can use proportional editing to your advantage such as to maybe grab a little piece of it and shoot some of it off words you can even put a cool little light in the center here just trying to give you some ideas and for number 30 if you like cell shaded renders have i got the check box for you head into the render tab and check freestyle now hit render image and whatever camera you set up is going to render it and then it'll render the freestyle and now you have a nice cell shaded model just by checking a box next up is the bevel node if you don't want to go to the trouble of making destructive bevel edits to your geometry or you don't want to do the modifier you can actually just go into input and bevel and then drop that normal data right into the normal socket of your principal bsdf in the shader editor and now it looks like there's a nice bevel here even though there's actually not and you can adjust the same kind of samples and radius of the bevel as you would in a modifier or with an operation another external one here you may have heard of the blam add-on for calibrating a blender camera you may have heard andrew price talking about that in his tutorials or anyone else now it is called f-spy and it's an external application that you can download and you export the blender camera data and then there's an add-on to import that blender data is it more of a hassle absolutely but it still works and it's amazing so check it out too many objects in your scene save yourself the trouble select the one you want to focus on and press the forward slash key to isolate it you can press it again to bring it out of isolation mode this allows you to focus on your edits on this one object without being distracted by all of the other ones ever notice how blender cameras tend to move kind of weird by default well actually they're starting very slowly then speeding up towards the middle and then slowing down as it reaches the end of the animation to fix this open up a new window here and go into the graph editor now select everything by choosing a press t and then choose linear instead of bezier now if you play it back it will be moving in linear fashion which is more common to camera movements have you ever lost yourself in a scene like actually have you ever navigated way far away and can't find your way back well most of you know that you can choose an object and press the period on the number pad and it will focus you to that object but what may be even more helpful is that if you press the home key or you go to view and frame all it will snap you back to look at the entire scene not just one object made a cool mesh but can't be bothered to create a rig for it that's no problem i couldn't even bother to make a cool mesh anyways there's a pose brush in sculpting mode where you don't even have to do the breaking you can just click and pose your model and it can actually get some pretty cool results you just have to fiddle with it now some of you already know that i'm a big fan of saving time now the blender gods might hate me or you for this but i'm of the mindset that if something is in the background and it doesn't need to be seen very much you don't need to spend that much time uv unwrapping it instead you can either smart uv unwrap it or my favorite is projecting from view just go to u project from view and now you can basically manipulate exactly what you want to see with it because you can literally be scaling exactly what you see on the texture this next tip is about hdris they're essentially 360 degree textures that contain lighting data as well as color so you can download any of these from hdrihaven.com for completely free and then once you do that you can go into blender go to your world tab in the properties here click on this button next to the color tab and click environment texture and now you can just go open and choose your hdri and now you've got a realistic background texture that's casting completely realistic lighting onto whatever you've made in your scene do you like voxel models well there's a quick way to make them out of any other object just go to the modifiers tab on the object you want to voxelify go to add modifier go to remesh and change it from sharp to blocks now you can adjust the scale here and the octree depth that's going to control the resolution for you or if you don't want to just generate it you can use a program like magic of voxel this next one is more about navigating blender's user interface so you got all these tabs here all the time and sometimes it can be a little overwhelming with a bunch of them open or closed or anything so a few things you can do are control click on one of them and it will open that one and close all the others just like that or if you want to open multiple for some reason you can control click and then swipe down and it will open all the ones that you swipe over and once you've had enough of all of this if you just need one open just control click on that one and everything else will close up when you're trying to select things quickly sometimes you go into a selection process thinking it's going to be simple but it's actually pretty complex well what would you do in this situation well it looks like all of the places are open so what we can do is something called select linked faces first you're going to select a face and then go to select select linked and then select linked flat faces and what it's going to do is select all of the linked faces that are flat along with the one face that you had selected what's cool about this one is that you can adjust the sharpness to figure out what kind of angles are allowed within that flat faces description so if you had something like this for example i could select this face go to select select length length flat faces and then adjust the sharpness accordingly if i were to just do a little bit it would only select a little bit but since i turn it up to about 12.4 degrees it's going to select everything and as long as i don't turn it above 90 it's not going to get these towers for all of you who love architecture out there there's an add-on called archimesh and archipack enable them both and then x out and now if you go to the shift a menu under mesh you'll find them both archimesh and archipack i'll test this out by adding an archipack wall and here you can see the basic user interface for dealing with this kind of thing you can input specific integers by holding the control key to snap it you can adjust the thickness of the wall with this slider and the height of the wall with this slider if you press n it will open the properties panel and if you go down to archipack you can choose more options about this wall for instance you can choose more parts such as two or three or four which would be a fully enclosed wall and then with that you could continue to snap and make it realistic to what a wall would actually look like or an entire room and you have complete control of this you can actually complete the width and the height of the wall and adjust that parameter just from the properties panel here and if you have it selected afterwards you can adjust different things like making some walls curved some wall straight it's the ultimate architecture add-on and it comes with much more including stairs doors windows and even decorations like books and lamps this one is particularly complex so stay tuned for those in-depth videos in eevee we've got a nice little checkbox for ambient occlusion but in cycles we have no such thing that is until the release of the ambien occlusion node you can add it in it's under input and once you add it in you can drag the color into the base color and you can see what that will look like almost immediately now you can use this in many other ways such as multiplying this on top of another texture and it's very very useful in almost every circumstance where you need to maybe an occlusion for this step i'm going to introduce you to my favorite node the color ramp node i've got a scan from 3dscans.com and an avian occlusion node plugged into this dragon here now i'm going to add a converter color ramp and plug it in right here now a color ramp has the ability to remove values of images in or out so we've got this black key right here and if i drag it in it will increase the effectiveness of that ambient occlusion making it look a lot darker and if i were to do the opposite drag the white and a little bit more it would create less ambient occlusion than there was before now if i were to clamp them together it would create really hard edges of the ambient occlusion there would be no gradient it would be all these hard chunky edges like this now how can we utilize this well i'd probably like to bring in a bit more and then i can adjust the colors of all of these as well as you can see you can get something that looks pretty cool as a texture just from one node so that's the color ramp node i use it in almost every single material and now to the next tip i've noticed that some people tend to use pixabay for everything or textures.com for everything here's my take on this use pixabay for backgrounds this is kind of their strong suit they've got a lot of really good stock looking footage and then for textures.com it's textures you've got every texture you could ever want but there's not a lot of really good backgrounds on textures.com from what i'm seeing it's really pixabay that has those really good backgrounds so pixabay backgrounds textures.com textures and yes of course you can find some on both but just as a rule of thumb that's where i like to start out this next tip is about reference images you can import them either using image reference or you can just open them up in an image editor now with this i want you to use them as color guides so see this background here i just stole it from this background of this app icon just by hovering over the base color for the material clicking e and then selecting an area to choose the color for now something interesting that i've noticed is that if you can't decide on where you want it to be and your mouse moves around a lot and maybe it slips over somewhere else what it will actually do is average the colors of whatever you've scrolled through so far which i think is an extremely interesting functionality because that means if you can't decide oh should it be the darker or should it be the letter you can just drag through and find whatever is the best mix of both until you find something that resembles it without needing to use the particles and the god ray effect so that's how to use reference images as color guides here's a quick animation tip right now if i play this ball drop into the ground it's going to do that which is not good but if i select all of it in the graph editor and then i go to t and choose bounce for interpolation this is what's going to happen now that is super quick and doesn't require any effort on the part of animation and there's actually a few more of them besides bounce you could choose elastic and that's literally just going to act like elastic and it's just a quick way to add some liveliness to your scene even if you're lazy about animation a really useful navigation trick is walk navigation if you go into your search menu and search walk you'll find view navigation just hit enter to start that and now you can move around with wasd just like a first person shooter so you can scroll the mouse wheel to go faster or slower you can press space to teleport and something that's even more fun if you press tab you'll enable gravity mode which allows you to fall just like you would in a normal game and so you can walk around especially if it's like an environment or something you'll be able to walk around it and experience it similarly to how you would in a game this also works with your camera if you press 0 on the numpad to snap to your camera view and you will enter walk navigation you can move around the camera just like you would a first version shooter this is a really easy way to find that perfect angle for the perfect render if you don't have any time to re-topologize a sculpt and it's horrendous and unworkable there's this new feature that i was just astounded by it's called voxel remesh and it's not the other voxel remish it's a really really cool one this time if you go into the normals tab for your object down in remesh you'll find a mode voxel and you can choose the voxel size and you can click voxel remesh and at first it's going to look a little different but if i shade smooth it's really not going to be distinguishable and if you look at the topology it's all quads they just come automatically converted the topology to all quads which is absolutely insane and paired with normals and displacement this would absolutely be a powerhouse i could drop this down to a few hundred polys and it would still look exactly the same ever been working on something cool only to realize that oh you've been working in edit mode not object mode or maybe you're working on a hard surface model and all the parts need to be separated out so that you can animate them more easily well i've got good news for you because you can select everything press p and separate by loose parts and every single individual piece will be separated into its own object for you much easier than doing them all individually now this is something that i used to do a lot i would go into the base color if i wanted to copy over a color and grab the hex code and then paste the hex code into the other hex code but you don't need to do that all you need to do is ctrl c over the base color or whichever color you're copying and then ctrl v over wherever you want to place it and that'll do the whole trick you don't need to do the hex code copying this next shortcut is one of the most convenient out of all of them if you press l it will select everything that is linked to whatever you just selected at and you can limit it actually to different things such as material if i wanted to just select this white material i could change that mode to material and then press l over this material and it will only select what was within that box now you can also do it by seams so i could select right here and that will only select what is within those seams now keep in mind that you have to start deselected and boom only selecting what's within the seams you can of course use this to do some insanely quick selections for easy editing and closely related if i have something selected already i can just hold shift l to deselect it instead of having to check this box right here so l to select shift l to deselect with the l key especially if you want to be a freelancer in the industry you're going to need to sometimes render images that can be layered on top of other images without the background and so to do this all you need to do is go into the render tab scroll down to film and check the box that says transparent now all of the background will disappear and it will be just an alpha channel this is definitely one of those tips that you'll want to keep in the back of your mind for pretty much your whole blender career now this is something that i would see people do on facebook and their renders but i didn't understand at first now here's what you're going to do to convert a texture into a normal map let's say you're using a noise texture on a plane like this here's what you're going to do you're going to add in a vector a bump drag the factor for the noise texture into the height of the bump and then drag the normal from the bump into the normal in the principle bsdf immediately it's going to be overblown so just crank down the strength until you see something you like and you can of course edit this to your heart's light that is how you translate a texture into normal data so we all know by now that if you press 1 3 7 or nine or any of those keys on the keypad it'll snap us to some sort of orthographic view but there's one that not a lot of us know about and it's really fun because it can throw your whole navigation off track so if you select any face at all and you press shift and then one of those numpad keys it will snap to those same things except relative to wherever that face is facing and as you can see if you try to snap out of it it'll be really weird all you have to do to fix that is just press one of those number pad keys again and it'll get you oriented correctly but let's say you wanted to work on something overhead from this face's perspective all you have to do is press shift 7 and now you can go work on it as if you were looking at it from the top now this next people have been harping on it a lot recently and i think that's a good thing stop using shift d unless you know that these are going to be different use alt d instead and now they're going to be instances and you can create as many of them as you want and then whenever you edit one well guess what it's going to affect all of them so especially if these were like little trees or something you're going to want them to be instances so that you don't have to do all the same work over and over again for the same object or maybe not worse but more annoyingly have to go and delete each of them and then reduplicate them back to their original spot it's just impractical here's another quick user interface tip if you click and drag you can select multiple parameters to edit at once say i need to scale this by three boom there it is or maybe if i've moved it somewhere off into the distance i just need to go all right zero enter now of course for zeros again you can just do the backspace trick where you just hold backspace over it but that works just as well i find this to be especially useful with nodes for example let's say you got your color slightly off a little bit and it was supposed to be full white well the rgb code for white is just 1-1-1 so i have to do is select them all type in one and there it is there's a lot more good applications of this that i can't think of right now but i know someone in the audience just thought of a way that they can use this that will help them so that's all i care about now this next one is an add-on it's called discombobulator you can find it under your edit preferences as always discombobulator and x out of that and now here's what you can do with it ducky 3d has a great tutorial on this if you go into your search menu and search discombobulator with an object selected and these are my settings for this right here repeat protrusions will make more branch off of each you'll see what i mean in a second i'm just going to press ok here and you'll get some crazy object like this i find stuff like this super cool i'm not sure if you do too but i just wanted to throw it in here just in case you need something like this in your scene and wrapping up number 60 here we all know the perspective and the orthographic cameras but did you know about these panoramic cameras they have a bunch of subtypes such as equirectangular i like this one a lot there's fisheye equidistant fisheye equisolen and mirrorball they all have their own settings and i'm fairly certain that someone creative can come up with something quite unique with these capabilities an object like this cube does not need to be smoothed an object like this sphere does need to be smoothed but what about an object like this where there's curved parts and flat parts if you try to smooth it it's going to look weird so what do you do you go to the normals tab down here under the mesh tab and go to auto smooth check that box and now you can see it's working perfectly what's happening here it's choosing which faces to smooth automatically and which ones to leave flat based on this angle you specify here the angle is 30 degrees so any face that intersects another one at an angle of 30 degrees or less will be smoothed any angle greater than that will not so these are 90 degree angles so they're flat ever tried to sculpt something like this and it just seems off somehow well that's because you need to use radial symmetry it's down here in the symmetry tab when you're sculpting and you can choose just what you want i'm going to use z since this is facing upwards and i'll choose 5 and that should get pretty much the exact results that i was looking for with the previous sculpt you can of course use this for whatever you need to whether it's a crease or a bump or pretty much anything if you've ever tried to fill a circle with f you're creating the most obscene end gone ever that's not necessarily always a bad thing but sometimes it's better to use grid fill if you use your search menu for grid fill you'll be getting something like this and you can of course change the span and the offset i've always found it to be a life saver keeping everything quads there's all these kinds of settings to make it perfect for your project do with it what you will welcome back to some more user interface tips if you've got these kinds of tabs on the side with like a properties panel you can scroll on them instead of clicking on the individual tabs and that'll save you some time additionally if you want to scroll between tabs while you're still editing things you can just hold ctrl and then scroll with the mouse wheel and it will cycle through all the tabs without you having to do any clicking of any kind if you want to add bevels to something like this stop right there because if you do you're going to bevel the inner edges as well as the boundary edges notice how they're also selected yeah exactly and that's going to result in some awful awful geometry that's going to be a pain to work with so just don't do it instead head to select go down to select loops and select boundary loop and it will select the edge loops that are the boundaries of whatever you had selected leaving you perfectly fine to do exactly that would you look at that it's another add-on it's the scatter objects add-on if you go into preferences and enable scatter objects you can make an object select another object head into this wrench and screwdriver panel and you'll be able to edit the settings and then once you're ready select the object to scatter and the object for it to be scattered on click your search menu and click scatter objects now you can just click and draw onto your object and then when you're ready press enter and it will have scattered that object for you randomizing the rotation anything you want there's so many settings in here that can create for basically any amount of possibilities now this should be a quick one it should hardly take any time at all if you use eevee at all with screen space reflections do yourself favor and uncheck half res trace just look at the difference in these reflections right here you can see that the edges are very pixelated but once i uncheck half red trace it all just sharpens up really nicely and that's one quick fix you can make that will make your reflections look more realistic even though it will cost you a small bit of performance we're back to the basics here with tip number 68 yes for those of you who are wondering this is a part of the game of thrones intro but this tip has nothing to do with game of thrones and everything to do with normals now what are normals well it's the way that a face is facing the way to see this is by going under here and checking face orientation where things are red that means that the faces are inside out and where it's blue that means that they're facing the right way so if i were to try to 3d print or put this in a game engine we'd run into some issues right here so how can we fix this well you go and select everything that you need to be facing the right way and then what i'm going to have you do is press alt n recalculate outside and now it's going to make sure that everything is facing outside that's what it is of course supposed to do but just in case it messes up here's a manual way to do it you can go and select things with l that are linked together and you can go alt n and flip and that will flip it whether it's facing inside out or outside in so just go ahead and make sure whenever you're making a project that your normals are facing the right way because otherwise you may run into problems and it's not really considered clean if you don't do this have you ever had edges that you just don't need well i've got bad news and good news if you try to delete the edges you're going to get some weird stuff going on but there is a function for you it's called dissolve edges if you select your edge loops and then press x and dissolve edges they will dissolve them into the face as well as it can so as to keep the low poly geometry and not cause any other problems in a lot of cases that is what you should be doing if you've created edges that you do not need all right what i'm about to show you is an add-on that is pretty much indispensable and everyone will tell you to use it from now on if you're just starting blender it's called nodewrangler so go into your edit preferences add-ons node wrangler just pretty much enable this by default if you get the chance here's what it will allow you to do any node that you want to see by itself you can press ctrl shift click on that node and it will attach it to a viewer node and throw that into the surface output of the material and then once it's all updated it'll show you only what that node is affecting so for instance this right here is a height map and it's showing me exactly what that looks like now what if i only wanted to see what the base color looks like when everything is put together and there it is very very interesting so you can just gain insight into what you need to change and how you can better your materials with this add-on so please get node wrangler pretty much every other tutorial you'll ever see will tell you to get it this next tip is just kind of a funny way to make some funny visual effects so select an object and you can make it disappear from either reflections the camera transmission really anything you want you have so much control over cycles render so go under your object panel for the object and then go under visibility go under array visibility and here's where the magic happens if you turn it off from the camera it will still be visible in reflections on the flip side if you turn it off from glossy it won't be seen in reflections but it'll be seen by the camera this next tip is a little bit more conceptual steel like an artist now there's no way i could put this into a one minute little clip here but i would definitely suggest you read this book by austin cleon it explains the ideas perfectly essentially nothing is really original everyone has inspirations and the best chart is what builds off of other art and so don't rip off or plagiarize but what you should be doing is building off of others and crediting them and the book puts it really well and has a lot of other tips that have helped me as an artist and many others who also recommend this book so in the spirit of that there's a website called blend swap where people upload their blender models to share as you can see you've got a dice here you've got some books here and people just put these up here for other blender users to use and some of them require attribution some of them do not and it's just a really good place to go to save yourself some time i've already said i really like to save time it's a big hobby of mine the best way to put it is just be efficient with your time and with your inspirations so definitely check out this book and definitely check out this website blender allows you to import svgs which can be vector graphics from any kind of adobe program or any kind of vector program at all really and it's very useful i think for especially text any kind of typography any kind of signage any kind of design anything that you would usually make in illustrator versus blender this is what you would need to use and by default it's going to be curves but you can change that you can actually select everything press your search button and type in convert and go down to convert to and then do mesh from curve and now everything will be a mesh and you can do with that what you will perhaps you want to extrude it all and make it into a boolean object that would be cool welcome back to fun ui tricks did you know that if you're scrolling through these tabs right here and there's one that you always want to keep up at the top maybe it's screencast keys maybe it's your 3d cursor for some reason well you can shift click on it and now anytime you go into another tab it'll be either at the top or somewhere else so that way you'll always have it there in case you're doing frequent editing this next one is fairly well known but i want to make sure that no one has to go without knowing this one it's called circle select you open it by pressing the c key you control the size of the circle with your scroll wheel and as you click and drag you will select whatever falls into that scroll wheel the only way to exit it is by pressing escape while you're doing it or pressing enter or pressing right click so there's three ways and if you hold down your middle mouse button you can actually erase what you were selecting it's a very useful selection tool and i use it all the time now this next tip is a bit hard because i don't actually use this one it's an add-on called pie menus but i'm pretty sure like every single other blender tutorial person uses it essentially what it does is it allows you to have all these pie menus with different shortcuts that make your workflow quicker i guess you have all these options available to you at your fingertips there's all these select pie menus there's a rendering pie menu and if you go into the drop down for the pie menu add-on when you enable it here's where you can find all of the different pie menus that there are and the reason why i don't use it is because i started like four years ago and so i'm used to all of the shortcuts and i can get around pretty well without any pie menus and i just get thrown off by them but i do want you guys to be able to be exposed to this because it's a very well made tool and it's very well used a lot of people swear by pie menus i personally don't use them but i would suggest you at least give it a whirl and see how it works for you and if it makes you faster and if so that's great i've hinted at this earlier if you press the zero key on the number pad it will snap you to your view of the camera you can even turn on walk navigation and walk around but what if you're just orbiting around you think hey this is a really good camera angle how do i set this here's what you can do control alt 0 on the number pad will set the camera where you are looking at in the viewport and then of course after the fact you can walk navigation you can right click and drag on the camera to move it around like this you can press g twice and do the same thing you can press g z and z and that'll zoom in and out you can't scroll that doesn't do the same thing g z and z the reason for that is because it's moving on a different axis because g z would be up and down g z z is the opposite of that axis so those are just some camera movement camera placement strategies for you to use let's move on to the next tip if you've done uv editing doesn't it annoy you when you try to select something but it everything disappears in the uv editor like what if you were working on that here's your solution click this little button right here and it will keep the uv map up and let you see what you're working on so if you're editing something in edit mode like you need to make a change okay now you can see exactly on the uv map where that's going to affect here's a quick modeling tip that i swear by sometimes i need like a little cool little divot and so what i like to do is press ctrl r to create a loop cut uh confirm it ctrl b to bevel the loop cut this is huge and then press e s and then you know whatever your your axis is and it's a super super fast way to do something just like that and tip number 80 which most of you probably know this but if you don't i feel bad for you so i'm going to tell you right now if you press ctrl i with something selected it will select the inverse of whatever you had selected just then kicking this off with the final 20 is an add-on that i love so much it's called hard ops and it usually comes in a bundle with another one called box cutter this one does not come default with blender you'll have to buy it off of gum road i believe they're 20 each but let me just show you what they do real fast so one of the features i use the most is just beveling corners really easily if you press q you'll get this pop-up and one of them is bevel and here you get the option to just instantly create super super clean bevels on things except it's not going to destroy your geometry that'll all still be there so you can continue to go and make whatever edits you need and those nice bevels will still be there now a little clarification these add-ons are mostly for hard surface modeling so if you want to make robots or something this is definitely something you should look into otherwise you could still look into it i found it to still be helpful either way and the real power is when it comes with box cutter because you get this nice little tab down here and watch this i swear you're gonna have a freak out when you see this look what this can do did you just see that how quick that was that is the box cutter workflow and if you double click you can cut all the way through there's so many different modes here there's a slice mode that's what that does if you want to learn more about it just look up some time lapses or tutorials and you'll see people creating things like this in just an hour or so i don't know very much of the functionality of it because i haven't had time to deep dive into it but this is the kind of thing that's possible very very quickly with hard ops so if that's something that you that that resonates with you i would definitely suggest that you check it out this next tip is about rendering you've probably noticed that there's noise in your renders even in the final renders now what you can do about this is check this box that says denoising don't even worry about the settings the default settings usually work just fine and what it's going to do is after the render pass is going to go through and do a denoising pass and just get rid of all the little speckles in your scene and it's super helpful all right let me know if you've ever even heard of this one it's kind of wacky it's called bend and you use it by selecting things and then pressing shift w and it has this strange bendy effect i'm not sure what i think about it if you know very much about this bend tool please let me know in the comments i'm interested to hear about your experiences with it now here's another tip that is an add-on that i haven't used because i've never needed to but i i'm keeping it in my back pocket in case i ever do it's called blender sync you have to get the blender cloud add-on i believe it's it's by blender.org so it can be trusted and essentially you can save your user preferences and your startup files on the cloud so that if you need to go somewhere else you find yourself in a different place you can be dropping in your own startup files and user settings at any time so if you're a serious blender user that's on the go a lot blender sync is probably for you alright this is getting to some meta stuff right here i get this question a lot how do you animate in edit mode is it even possible the answer is yes and i figured it out a long time ago about a year ago when doing some client stuff it turns out if you want to animate in edit mode here's what you what you got to do you select whatever you need to be animating press ctrl h and hook to new object all right now look what happens if i move this object around that's right it's moving the geometry within this object so that means i can animate this object right here this is funny and then our location there and now we've got that and let's layer some of our previous tips i go back into the graph editor select it all now i'm going to go into t and do elastic [Laughter] it happens to be 12 24 am where i am in case you can't tell i apologize if this is unprofessional so to answer your questions yes it's possible that am i animate in edit mode you can do pretty much anything in edit mode and animation and blender so go wild make the weirdest thing this is what blender's for this right here is the epitome of what blender is for all right this next tip is about the follow path constraint if you add a path or curve such as a circle like this one and then you place a light near it and then you put a object constraint it's under this little gear icon and choose follow path and then you select the bezier curve here with this offset value here you can choose where on the curve it's going to be and that way you can animate something like a light following a path but it doesn't have to be a light it could be really any other object i'm a big fan of the skin modifier watch this if i add in even a cube or really any shape and merge it at center i'll have a vertex and then i can just start control clicking and creating a shape with that now there's two things you can do here you can create modern art or you can create a low poly tree i've done both of those a lot so how about we stick with a low poly tree for this one that sounds good to me so once you get a shape that you really like here's all you have to do go into modifiers add the skin modifier here's what it does and now here's how you can control it you can go into wireframe mode select any vertex you want press ctrl a and it's as if you're scaling the skin around the tree and so what i like to do is make the ends of the branches really thin and then the bases of the branches a little more thick all the way down to the trunk which is of course the thickest of them all and then look at that low poly tree this next tip is an add-on that makes booleans easier it's called bool tool go search it up in preferences you can click shortcuts under the drop down to see what everything's about here's what we got going on here i can add a cube i can go ahead and add another cube select them both control shift b brush boolean difference and now we've got a really easy to see easy to work with boolean object that's just kind of automatically done for us and that's just super convenient you can still go ahead and edit anything about this other one for instance i could go and bubble this vertex for some reason and make that a weird shape and it is super convenient i can say that i have tried this out before and it has made my workflow a bit more convenient it can get a little overwhelming to have a whole bunch of add-ons to work with all at first and you probably won't remember how to use them all so just remember that that's okay now this next one is a pretty critical modeling technique that i'm sure that you should know so it's snapping it's called snapping and if you hold ctrl you'll snap based on increment but if you go up here you can change that you can make it vertex i could press g and then hold ctrl and once i hit the nearest vertex it'll snap to that and that's super useful another useful one is edge mode i hold ctrl and it'll snap me to whichever edge i'm holding on to and this is useful for so many reasons let's say i want to be in face mode instead and i've got a landscape if i've got a landscape on the ground that's super big and let's say the cylinder is a tree i could go ahead press g and hold ctrl and it'll just snap me all over this face so wherever i need it to be i can move one here alt d alt d it's super super fast don't even need to worry about it this next tip is kind of similar to the bend in that i don't really hear about a lot it's called shrink and essentially what you can do is just hold alt s just press it once actually and you can create this type of adjustment it's a unique kind of adjustment that's where the value comes from shrink fatten alt s that's all you need to know about it while researching this i found a funny alternative to the mirror modifier i don't i can't to date think of why you would use it but here it is anyway look at this if you select everything and then in your search type symmetrize it will copy the model over from one half to the other half and it just kind of decides on its own which is the right one and you've got some you've got some direction you've got some threshold control over here it's it's really interesting and i'm interested to see how i'll use it in my workflow in the future now this next one is super interesting you probably all know that you can bridge edge loops so let's say you had two faces here that you inset and you press w and then you can bridge faces right here and it'll create a bridge across those faces and it'll actually delete the face right here so there's no extra topology that you don't need but one application i didn't think of when testing this was that if you do two on the opposite sides of each other and you inset inwards you can actually bridge the faces like this and it'll create a hole in the center we've only got a few more bear with me so let's say you want to lock the transform of something like this there's actually physical lock icons that you can click so i could lock this on the z axis so that means i can't move it up or down on the z anymore if i'm pressing g it's only going to be moving it on the other axis and you can do that same thing with the rotation and the scale if i lock the scale completely that means i can't scale it anymore and so if you want to you could make a more interactive modeling and animation experience just by working with those transform locks here's one that i surprisingly only found out about about six months ago you can repeat an action that you make just by pressing shift r so see how i just extruded just a little unit well if i press shift r a bunch of times it'll repeat just that or let's say i move it 0.5 on the x i press shift r i can hold it and just keep moving that way and it really just works with anything any kind of operation so it's awesome all right now this one i promise i've known longer than six months all you got to do is control click with something selected and it will extrude and extend that something to wherever you're clicking and it will try to match the angles accordingly although it's not going to work if you do if you're being goofy like this it's not gonna work heading into the final four here number 97 is the blender manual here you'll find basically everything that is there to know about blender by the technical definition yes you will find every single shortcut there is yes you will find every single parameter there is explained usually with images so if you can stomach the technical jargon please head over to the blender manual anytime you have a question about anything if you're bored one day you've got some time head into cycles just look at some of these material settings so this is your resource your community members have created this collaboratively with blender so make good use of it tip number 98 is to join the blender community there are so so many people ready to answer your questions ready to give you support and give you feedback they're all over the place facebook twitter discord linkedin name a social media platform there's blender people everywhere tip number 99 don't be a perfectionist this is one of the hardest ones to implement out of all of them i know i a lot of people who are into blender seem to be perfectionists they want every little detail to be perfect but just know that that's not what people who look at your art are looking for at least not the critical ones if you show your family and you show your if you show your friends because that's let's be honest that's what a lot of us are doing they will be impressed no matter what it looks like and use those experiences to grow don't focus on one project and trying to make that one perfect get it done show people get feedback and then use that feedback to improve for next time as long as you're creating out projects there's no way that you can't be growing unless you're literally just making the same thing over and over and over again i mean everything you make in cg is going to be so different that there's not going to be any way for you to not pick up anything so just trust the learning process and don't put all of your faith and self-worth into being a perfectionist and making everything go perfectly because that's just not the way it is it's blender i mean come on and number 100 on that note always just remember why you're doing blender in the first place the chances are that it makes you happy and sometimes you can get caught up in goals you create for yourself like i want to make this kind of art by this time and those are all good things but just remember that this is a hobby and it makes you happy and if it's something that you would do for free in your free time then just enjoy that and that's something that i personally have struggled with and i know a lot of people that struggle with it as well especially especially anyone who is trying game development out anyone who's trying 3d modeling and especially perfectionists because your natural tendency is to put more pressure on yourself and if you feel like you can learn more that's what you're going to do but just don't forget don't forget the fun part of it that's all i got to say so this was a blast to make it is current it is oh it's late it was it's late but i had had so much fun making this video there's hopefully a lot of value packed in i hope that you learned a lot and that you didn't know all of these if that's the case please show some support on this video i would really appreciate it thank you so much for watching i want to reiterate my gratitude i really appreciate it so i hope you have a great day and i wish you good luck the best of luck in all of your future blender projects happy creating

Channel: Daniel Krafft

Views: 916,179

Keywords: blender 2.8 tips, blender 2.8 tips and tricks, sculpting in blender 2.8 tips, blender 2.8 animation tips, blender 2.8 quick tips, blender 2.8 lighting tips, blender 2.8 camera tips, blender 2.8 tips adn tricks, blender 2.8 rendering tips, daniel krafft, design school online, blender, blender 2.83, blender tips and tricks, blender tips and tricks 2.8, blender 2.8 modeling tips and tricks, blender tips and tricks for beginners, 100 blender tips, blender tips, top blender tips

Id: _9dEqM3H31g

Length: 56min 0sec (3360 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Sipredion]

I'm 10 minutes in. I had to stop so I could come back and tell you that I love you. Seriously, this is amazing. Definitely saving this.

[u/theuserwithoutaname]

Fuck.

YES.