20+ Blender Tips That Will Save You Hours

what's up guys Novae here I'm going to share some workflow tips to help you make your blender projects faster and just work more efficiently in general I tried to find as many lesser known tricks as I could but there's a couple Classics in here too just in case you haven't heard of them now you may already know that if you select the light and press shift T you can use your cursor to tell blender where you want the light to point at but we can actually take this one step further go and select your light and go into the constraints tab go ahead and add a track to constraint and set the target to whatever you want to light and now if we move this light uh you can see that it is tracking the object no matter where it is now if your light is pointing somewhere else there's an easy way to fix this just select your object go into object up here set origin and set origin to Geometry so now you can just duplicate these add as many as you want you can animate them to give uh it a cool light animation effect kind of like you see in the preview here if you want the light to hit a specific point of the model just shift right click anywhere to add your 3D marker there make an empty and then just set the target the empty instead and now the light is tracking the empty so the default hdri is that blender gives you straight out the box once you uncheck scene World these ones they're fine but I like using custom hdris and having to set them up every time here having to go into uh where is it it's in color environment texture open checking my hdris and then adding whatever I want it takes a long time now I didn't know for the longest time that you could actually put your own custom downloaded hdris in here and it's actually super simple all you have to do is to just click on this Cog wheel press install under hdis right here and go to your hdri folder and just pick whichever one you want I'm going to go with uh this one close it and then it should be here for all of your blender project files forever if you want you can literally go to your hdri folder press a install Light and it's going to install all the hdris you have in your folder so now you can quickly go through all of them see what looks good see what doesn't and uh yeah pretty cool now let's say I had the genius idea of adding 20s something monkeys to my scene thinking it'll look good but after the realization that it looks like buns I don't really feel like pressing contrl Z 30 times giving blender a hard time or selecting all of them one by one so I can just go to edit undo history and click on the event that I did before I made all the monkeys now let's say you have a pretty dense scene with lots of foliage that takes a while to render and you just want to lock in on one object and tweak it all you have to do is to just press contrl B and just drag a box around it and now blender will only render this exact region allowing you to make tweaks to whatever you want without it having to render your your entire composition if you want to disable this all you have to do is to just press control alt B and it will reset the um render region also if you make the selection your camera uh this will just improve General performance and make your scene render faster now I'm not the most organized blender user but I know that pretty much every project I've had I usually give up on a material that doesn't look good and it serves no purpose in my scene anymore and it just stays there and there's not an obvious way to get rid of it if you press this x button all it does is just removes whatever material you have from the object you have selected but there's actually a really great solution for this and all you have to do is to just go up here select this button and go to Orphan data and here you will see all of the materials and meshes that you're not using in this scene and they don't serve any purpose they're just in there to annoy you so all you have to do is is just click Purge Purge and they will no longer be here so instead of making notepad files to remind yourself what there is that still needs to be done you can actually have a list like this straight in blender so all you have to do is to just open up a new window in here by dragging on one of these Corners select text editor press new and now you have a notepad straight inside blender where you can type whatever you want and if you want to zoom in just hold control and uh scroll your mouse wheel here's a pretty cool trick I found out about pretty recently uh you can just drag any mesh out of your outliner into your scene like this and have it snap to whatever other object you want to place it on this is also one that I use pretty frequently if I want to go into full screen on any of these windows just to give me more screen real estate or Precision I just Mouse over whatever I want to full screen and I press control space and that will put me in a full screen view of whatever window is mousing over and if you want to get out of this view just click this button or press control space again if you want to locate something in your collections really quickly all you have to do is to just select it in a viewport press the till the key on your collections Tab and go to show active and it will reveal wherever it is in your collections now there's quite a lot of things going on in this scene let's say I want to click this ice cube but this camera is in front of it and that might get really annoying after a while so there's two things you can do you can either go up here and disable extras which will disable most empties cameras and wires Etc or you can actually select it here let's do the thing and if you enable this restriction toggle here the selectable if you disable this this camera will no longer be selectable in the viewport so now you can click on that Cube freely without having that camera bother you this also works really well with five log cubes over your scene or certain parts of foliage that are big when you're working with a lot of foliage so this has come in handy tons of times for me if your node setup feels pretty claustrophobic you can actually select them all press s and scale them and if you press middle Mouse button it will actually constrain them to the x-axis so you can just have a nicer setup with lots of space let's say you have a node in between two other nodes so instead of deleting it and dragging the color back into the base color in my example uh a faster way to do this is to just press contrl X on the Node that you don't want there and it will automatically reconnect the output and input if you want to remove a bunch of links uh way faster uh you can just hold control and right click and drag your mouse and it will enable this knife tool that lets you cut multiple links with one Mouse swipe you can also rotate nodes kind of like you would in the viewport by just selecting them pressing R and with this I could just quickly Make Way for a displacement or volume setup I'm sure you've run into this issue where you try to extrude a face uh on an axis and these faces just get absolutely stretched so an easy way to fix this is to just uh go to the options up here and check correct phas attributes and now if we try that again uh your texture will look fine so when I do animation I find myself having to switch between the timeline and the graph editor pretty frequently but clicking on these small buttons isn't very fun so what you can do instead is to just press control Tab and it will switch the window automatically a lot of the times when you're animating in the graph editor you're going to have multiple channels here whether it be location rotation scale or whatever now what if I want to tweak only one of these channels in my case I'm going to tweak the X location by pressing shift H and then the til the key and frame all and that's going to give me a good good view of my curve giving me the most amount of control I can get and then to unhide all the other ones you can just press alt H now I only have six channels here so I could just hide them but imagine if you have 12 or more then this becomes way more efficient and workflow effective so here's a pretty cool trick if you are going to be rendering multiple shots in uh one scene so I have two cameras set up here my wide camera and my close camera and let's say I want the cameras to switch at frame 50 so what you do is you select your wide camera first then go to your timeline marker find camera to marker and that's going to set your first camera marker down here let's go to frame 50 let's select the other camera which in my case is the camera close same thing marker bind camera to markers and now once I play this back you can see that on frame 50 the cameras are going to change and uh we get a pretty cool result that's going to save us some time when rendering you can also use math equations on just about any field that has numbers in it so let's say I need to render 29 additional frames on top of these ones so I can just do plus 29 uh on the end field instead of doing the math in my head this also works for any of these so if I want to drop the noise threshold by 50% just divided by two works on any of them here you can even use pi and it will input the pi number now the quick favorites button is really cool because it allows you to do things much faster for example to set the origin to Geometry which is a function that I use a lot you need to go up here go to origin and then click on Origin the geometry but if I rightclick this I already have it added to my quick favorites uh I can now press Q on any object and then set it from here I also have a couple other ones geometry origin origin 3D cursor and randomized transform and this just allows me really quickly to do things that are hidden in some of these uh menus here every single mode in blender has its own uh quick favorites so these are my quick favorites for um the edit mode these are the things that I use a lot usually hidden behind menus and I just have them here for a really quick use now this is a feature I haven't seen anyone use in blender uh it's called the scale cage and you access it by holding on this button and going to scale cage this is the T menu you can open it with the T key and what it allows you to do if you select any of these objects you now have these uh how many is that 26 verticy type things and you can use these to now scale things out on those vertices if that makes sense this is different from scale because if I just scale this on the x-axis it's going to scale both sides but on the scale cage I can use this to make just this uh this part of the Shelf slightly longer longer as you can see in the scene here and not touch the other end this is a lot faster than just grabbing edges and extruding them so yeah I'm really surprised that I haven't seen anyone use this before so personally I'm not a huge fan of the blender F viewer but the one thing that I do love about it is the ability to add bookmarks you can just add any folders you want here for quick access so you can navigate it faster so just open whatever folder you want and then press this plus key and it's going to add it to the bookmarks and then you can use the arrow keys to position it on the list but yeah that's all the tips I was able to squeeze into this video and I hope you learned something cool that you can Implement in your daily use if you know any other useful tips that I didn't cover here drop them in the comments below because I'm always looking for stuff like this that's it peace out

Channel: novocaine

Views: 17,526

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Id: wg56ugqKZnk

Length: 11min 47sec (707 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2024