200+ Helpful Blender 3D Hacks in Under 1 Hour

in this video you're going to learn sound mapping object morphing how to use a blender and literally 197 other things in under an hour and 90 of you still aren't subscribed i'm never running out of blender tips by the way tip number one everyone knows that when you're transforming an object you can hold ctrl and it will snap based on an increment but what if you want it to snap to the grid well in that case you go up to your snap settings and you turn on absolute grid snap now when you hold control it will snap to the grid based on the pivot point's position tip number two have you ever wondered what these interface item things do well they're actually presets you can choose from a variety of presets or create your own based on your project if you've got a bunch of objects that are parented together maybe you're making a cool mech or something like that you can use these square brackets to select up and down the hierarchy now this next one is an odd little navigation tip i found if you press alt middle click don't drag just press it'll just send your view to wherever you clicked it's pretty cool if you're trying to preview your render but a bunch of stuff gets in the way that's annoying you can check this box to get rid of all those overlays or you can press shift alt z that's the tip the shortcut tip number six are you tired of adding in lights and then manually adjusting the rotation towards the objects well not anymore because if you go into the constraints tab add a constraint track two select the target object change the up axis to y and change the target axis to negative z and now whenever you move your light around it will automatically rotate towards your object tip number seven i'm working on a pdf version of all of my tips videos coincidentally i also decided to become a philanthropist and i'm giving it away for free on gumroad that link is in the description all it costs is one like button or maybe a subscribe button if you're feeling generous tip number eight when you're working with curves they're either cyclic or not cyclic that just means whether they are connected or not and you can switch between those two things by pressing alt c everyone already knows that if you press the o key or check this button you're going to get proportional editing now what this does is allows you to affect objects within a range of whichever object you're editing however what a lot of people don't know is that you can actually press shift o and that will change the fall off with this pie menu here tip number 10 everybody knows that renders get noise and it definitely makes it look worse so how do you get rid of it the best and most efficient method that i found is compositing it with a denoised node now what you're going to need to do here is go into your render passes check denoising data and then in compositing add in a denoise node that is under filter you're going to get these three items noisy image denoising normal and denoising albedo you're going to plug all of those into denoise plug that into the composite and wow wow just look at that that's incredible stunning tip number 11 the link function allows you to bring in objects from other scenes the cool thing about the link function is that when you make changes to the original file the changes will be reflected in the linked file tip number 12 working with pivot points is confusing but if you press the control and period key on the keyboard you can actually move around the pivot point as if it were any other object tip number 13 in edit mode if you go to mesh and convex hull it will generate a convex mesh around whatever object you have this is mostly useful if you're making collision objects but you can use it for a few other things in the shader editor if you're working with a color ram you could press the plus button to add a stop right in the middle or you could control click anywhere on the ramp to add a stop anywhere tip number 15 when you're in eva using volumetrics you'll notice there's this flickering that goes on and it is so annoying so to get rid of that go into your sampling and change the viewport down to one it's such an unexpected solution but it works so smoothly now now you already know about noise but did you know that in an animation noise is especially awful because it stays the same and it just leaves like this weird filter over whatever you're seeing and it's and it makes it look really unrealistic realistically the noise pattern would change and that's what this button right here does under sampling under advanced in your render properties panel now you just click on this clock and what it will do is change the seed that determines the noise for every single frame tip number 17 is adaptive subdivision now essentially what this does is it subdivides models differently based on where they are now from what i can tell a lot of it has to do with the proximity to the camera here i have two different viewports with the same plane open as you can see as we zoom in we get that and as we reach about the same size on this plane it's insanely subdivided up close keep in mind that this only works with cycles at the moment tip number 18 naturally the next thing to talk about is adaptive sampling where adaptive subdivision works on actually just changing the geometry the adaptive sampling essentially gives more of the rendering power to sections of the scene based on an estimated potential noise level for tip number 19 we're going to do a quick soft body simulation now you're going to need a plane and a cube for this for the cube we're going to go into physics properties and add a soft body simulation uncheck the gold check box and then hit play as you can see it's working but it's falling straight through the floor now go on to your floor object and add a collision simulation that's again under the physics properties it's much much easier on the memory if you subdivide after the soft body simulation than during the soft body simulation because it has to calculate for each of those vertices so what i would recommend is just doing a few subdivisions at first and then adding a subdivision surface afterwards a couple things that you're going to want to check include stiffness and self-collision and now we've got this sweet little soft body simulation tip number 20. if you find yourself making the same materials over and over again the material library add-on might actually have your back if you add a material go down to material library vx you can select a library either a collection of sample materials or you can create your own libraries of materials you can either copy your current material into this library for use later or you can choose from one of the various materials that you've already created and that's how the magic happens tip number 21 lily's surface scraper is back and better than ever if you go and add a material in an object you can go down into lily's surface scraper that's the menu and you there's a there's a variety of available sources right so let's just let's pick one let's pick one of these i i think let's go with cc0 textures and let's see huh uh what what material looks good i like this one so let's let's click on this wood right here so yeah just copy the link uh go back to blender you know nothing nothing serious yet just import the surface paste in the url that sounds about right hit the ok button ladies and gentlemen what you're about to see when i go into rendered mode is going to change your entire life paint is temporary lily's surface scraper that's no now that is eternal because lily's service scraper lets you paste in any link for any material from any of these sources and it adds the entire material all the maps all the normals all the roughness to the uh sorry about that my my chair has an allergic reaction to the surface scrape tip number 22 if you've watched these videos you've probably used the blender manual at some point but have you used the blender api you can actually find the exact operator that it's referencing and you can copy that paste it into the blender api and you can find documentation on all of these tip number 23 adobe color has been updated there's new harmony rules there's an extract gradient ability there's accessibility tools that allow you to create colorblind safe art it's pretty cool stuff it's one of the best ways i think to come up with a color scheme tip 24 if you're trying to pose a light really easily just press shift t and it'll snap to wherever you're pointing the mouse look guys i know you've all done the thing where you go around select a bunch of nonsense even though it's the exact same object well stop all right never do that again because there's an option called select pattern and if you are responsible and name your objects appropriately you can search for words select all of them tip number 26 if you're in cycles and you render something with the crypto map object you'll notice a few of them down in compositing if you go ahead and add in a matte cryptomat node plug all those passes and the image in if you drag the pick into the viewer that means that you're going to get this whole deal up here and if you click on add and remove you can actually select individual objects to mask out check this out you can retexture objects you can add depth of field you can do all sorts of things and so this kryptomat node is super cool tip number 27 blender 2.83 has added some new and improved sculpting brushes of course the one i'm showing you now sourced from the blender website is the cloth brush they it blew up the entire internet for a while and for a good reason it's a really cool thing but there's some other good ones as well they've also improved some brushes a lot the layer brush for example has been improved greatly look how smooth it is in 2.83 compared to 2.82 dimensions.com is one of the coolest external sights that i found while researching this video it essentially just has a ton of common objects and creatures and you can download any one of them at scale at scale so for instance check out the sloth bear it shows you a human outline as well as the software itself and shows you some average dimensions tip number 29 if you've got two similar nodes and you want to change some setting for both of them you can select both of them and then instead of just dragging on a slide or something like that you press alt and drag the slider and it changes it for both of them tip number 30 everybody already knows that if you press e over a color space you can actually select anywhere and it will choose that color for you the downside with a color ramp is it just changes it all if you press alt e instead on one of those it allows you to select one color and then select the next color something else crazy with color ramps and eyedroppers is if you press the e key and then drag it selects all of the colors and adds them as separate stops tip number 32 when you have a normal material and you scale it up multiple times which you may need to do you will notice repeating patterns now this is the same when it's at a lower scale or at a higher skill you'll still notice those patterns however with the polygon uber mapping node there are two more options that you have such as mosaic rotation and mosaic noise that help eliminate that almost entirely especially when you're at a larger distance away tip number 33 you've probably heard that you can edit images externally but you probably haven't done it yet because you're either too lazy or can't figure out how to link it so go into your blender preferences go down to file paths go down to applications and from image editor you're gonna have to find the exe file of your editor i'm using photoshop so what i did to find this file was create a shortcut right click the shortcut go to open file location and there it is tip number 34 snap the camera to your view by pressing ctrl numpad 0 everybody needs to know this tip number 35 sometimes it's better to use the camera shift parameters which is under the lens settings instead of moving the camera if your render preview is taking up too much of your power you can actually just pause the render preview with this pause button right up here and it will just stop the extra lights add-on adds a bunch of man-made and natural light sources as default objects tip number 38 if you change your view transform from filmic to false color it will show you a good way to calibrate your brightness correctly not all monitors display the same but with false color it'll show you where it's too bright it's best to aim for green tip number 39 for natural light sources you're going to want to color it using a black body node this can be found under the converter notes it uses a kelvin temperature scale to determine the color of the light any color that is outside of the scale is considered artificial tip number 40 you're not limited to just using lights when you're lighting your scene you can use planes you can use color ramps to make wacky shapes on them and make a missive materials out of this like this one that's mimicking a soft box tip number 40 in preferences under interface you can go down to temporary windows under editors and choose where the render windows and file browser windows will appear now if i render it just switches to an image editor and renders there tip number 42 blender 2.83 has a lot more themes if you go into edit preferences themes and under presets you'll find that there's more than dark and light there are deep gray maya minimal dark moto print friendly oh my and ksi but most of those are impossible to work in so i like to use blender dark still tip number 43 if you're the most efficient person in the world there is a function for you called repeat history it expands upon the repeat last functionality by letting you repeat any of your previous actions from any time boom tip number 44 everyone knows that when you've got an animation going it's going all over the place and if you try to move it it's going to mess up your whole animation that's where the delta transform comes in go into your transform under that there's a delta transform and this is what you do if you want to transform an animated object tip number 45 if you've ever done something like add a loop cut accidentally offset it a little bit undid the entire thing and then did it again just because you wanted it centered you're an idiot let me tell you how to do it you add a loop cut and if you offset it you can offset it all you want right click goes right back to the center the reason why there's so many select hotkeys in blender is because there's a variety of modifiers that do different functions the alt key for example pulls up an enumeration list when used with selection this mainly allows you to select objects within other objects when you hold down the control key while you're going to select what it does is it chooses to select based on where the origin is not based on where you're clicking and then the shift key of course allows you to select multiple unless you use it on an actively selected object in which case it deselects it tip number 49 you may have seen this over scan checkbox in film but if you're most people you probably don't know what it does it's to fix screen space effects in eevee so check out this reflection on this cube right if i have overscan unchecked and render this image what overscan does is it doesn't actually add to the size of the output image it just calculates things outside the frame to improve the screen space effects when i render this with the overscan checkbox checked you can see that the reflection of the cube is back tip number 50. you may have heard that standing desk can improve your energy and health while working now i have found this to be true i can only get to about 3am sitting down but standing up now that's a different story tip number 51 now for these next few tips i wanted to shout out some of the friends i've made along the way this is josh gambrell now this is the guy where you go to when you want to learn hard service modeling in fact he just released a hard surface handbook for free it's pretty awesome you should go check it out now this next guy his name's cg patrick he's a vfx professional he's at least six times as talented as me and his videos are absolutely top notch and finally on this list i want to shout out the blender nest and all the folks that are on there for these next few tips i want to point you to some free resources across the internet tip number 54 if you are an unreal slash blender workflow guy there's a website called mega scans they got like 12 000 photo scanned objects in here and you can get it all for free if you're an unreal developer tip number 55 on screen is a list of free music sites and tip number 56 on screen is a list of free image editors tip number 57 you may have noticed these selection widgets up top when you click and drag by default it's just going to select whatever you've clicked and dragged upon but you can actually change that mode with these buttons up here such as extend selection subtract from selection invert selection that's an interesting one and then intersect selection for my next blender trick i'm going to break the laws of time blender runs animations by default at 24 frames per second but if you decide that you want that to be different you can't go and change the frame rate directly it'll mess up your entire animation if you want to do it the right way you can actually do so quite easily let's say you want to quadruple the frame rate of this animation first we're gonna have to change the end frame to four times the original value next you're gonna change the frame rate to four times that same value you're gonna change the old value to the old number of frames and then the new value to the new number of frames there's gonna be this bar to the left that goes four times as slowly as this i'm assuming it's interpolating between them so now we render this out and it's going to take four times as long but it's worth it because you turn 24 fps into 96 without doing any work tip number 59 you're probably used to graph editors looking like this where one of them is just going completely off the charts and it's really hard to edit that way so the way that you're gonna do that is click normalize what this does is displays the curves from negative one to one and then the changes you make from there will adjust accordingly tip number sixty i totally nabbed this one from curtis holt don't be running your mouth and telling people the goals that you want to achieve you gain validation from telling people which means that you're psychologically less likely to actually do them tip number 61 a quick way to re-situate yourself in the scene is to press shift c now this snaps your view to the center and the cursor to the center all at once remember the link tip where you can link objects from other files where there's an add-on called edit linked library it's under item here after you enable it and it allows you to quickly edit linked objects just by clicking a button when you're ready to go back go back to that same menu and click return to original file tip number 63 everyone knows by now that f curves have modifiers you go into the end panel when you have an f curve selected go to add modifier and in this case i'm going to talk to you about stepped interpolation it gives you several options to change the step size and it gives this really cool blocky effect and i can already tell that this is a cool effect waiting to happen tip number 64 speaking about animation if you've got a really long one and you're kind of lost and the playhead is way out somewhere you can just press the zero key on the numpad and it'll snap you right to it tip number 65 we talked about delta transform earlier now one thing that you're allowed to do is apply different transforms to the delta so for instance right here if you press ctrl a and location to deltas this is now the delta location so when i start it now it's going to start from way out there because the delta location becomes right here instead of in the center of the grid tip number 66 with shift numpad 4 and 6 you can actually roll the camera like this tip number 67 if you select your camera you can enable instagram safe areas and you can define little outlines in here to guide you when you're blocking out your scene tip number 68 if you'd like to preview a laggy animation real time without rendering it you can go into view and viewport render animation it works the same as rendering your animation except it will render using the viewports engine not cycles or eevee tip number 69 in one of your projects you're eventually going to wake up and realize wait a minute this image texture sucks and in some cases especially if you're reusing it a lot you can go into image you can and should go into image replace and replace it with something better tip number 70 vr is coming to blender you can actually enable it right now if you go into preferences and add-ons and enable vr scene inspection i'd love to show you but i don't actually own a vr headset right now it's no big deal i'm not tilted about it at least i have this model of one in blender am i right fellas tip number 71 you can get pie menus regarding pivot points and transform orientations by pressing the period and comma keys respectively tip number 72 if you don't like this header stuff up at the top you can move it to the bottom with the interface settings but don't be surprised if someone calls you a psychopath tip number 73 anytime you're confused about a certain set of settings you can actually right click on it and click online manual and a tab will open up describing what you're looking at tip number 74 if you press shift b and then draw a box it will zoom your view to that box tip number 75 i found this fun article called 51 great animation exercises to master and basically just takes you through several levels of different exercises to do and this could be great to go through if you're trying to learn animation billboards are a common trick in video games but you might not use them in 3d lot here's how you do it basically you have an image as a plane or whatever you add an object constraint you're gonna do track two and then you're gonna target the camera set the up axis to y and then set the target to z and now you've got a fully functioning billboard that will always look at the rotation of the camera tip number 77 if you have an image and you go into the image editor and go under image and then go to extract palette from image it will actually take all the colors from this image and then create a color palette for you that you can then use in painting and all of that tip number 78 if you messed up one side of your model or for any reason want to symmetrize one side to the other you can go under symmetry and there's a button called symmetrize you choose the directions such as negative x to plus x and press symmetrize there tip number 79 this is probably the most meta so far if you have an object that you have rotated a specific way you can go under orientations and create a custom orientation based on this object so that means that whenever you rotate something it will use the axes of this custom object and tip number 80. if you hold alt and scroll your mouse wheel you can scroll through the timeline of your animation pretty convenient if you have a small monitor and you don't want to have to be doing this tip number 81 everyone knows that we all hate uv unwrapping but did you know that you can have more than one uv map if you go under object data under uv maps you can press the plus or minus key to add or remove uv maps you can use this for example to map multiple textures on top of each other like i did here just make sure you specify which uv map to use for each texture by using a uv map input node tip number 82 this is the outliner window by default but if you change the display mode up here you can get all sorts of different things such as blend file data and multiple view layers at once tip number 83 when you're in set using the iq you can press ctrl and it will start to create extrusion at the same time you can do this multiple times in the same extrusion operation to create some really cool geometry tip number 84 you've heard of hdr haven you've heard of texture haven and now there's 3d model haven super high quality models there's a lot of them and it's growing pretty fast as it's gaining a lot of patreon support tip number 85 if you're performing an inset with the i key and you press the o key it'll actually do what's called an outset which seems to create some sort of edge loop around the sides tip number 86 if you've ever wondered what this pen shape button does in sculpting mode it's a tool by which you can control the radius and strength of a brush by how hard you press on the surface it's actually really cool tip number 87 while you're in setting using the eye key you can actually press the b key as well and that will inset against the boundary of the object instead of from the center tip number 88 if you press this button right here it will give you a cool transform gizmo that has all three move rotate and scale all in the same gizmo tip number 89 blender now supports the openvdb file format which will allow you to import and render lots of cool volume objects tip number 90 be tracer is a cool add-on that has a lot of tools available for curves mesh follow particle trace things like that one of my favorite is object trace that will trace any object and turn it into a curve yes even suzanne tip number 91 if you press y you can split off faces from all the surrounding edges tip number 92 in compositing there's something called the split viewer node you can plug in two inputs to it and then it will show both of them right next to each other for you to compare with a slider based on how much of each image should be shown it's really useful for comparing changes you're going to make with the original tip number 93 do you like substance well if you're a student or a teacher you're actually entitled to get it for free and if you're not into all that monthly nonsense you can actually get a perpetual license for both substance designer and painter from steam for one single price tip number 95 in the shader editor you can mute nodes by pressing the m key with them selected and it'll show you which input is just going to pass through instead tip number 96 the blender guru himself has an excellent excellent free lighting mastery course on youtube that you should immediately go watch right after this video tip number 97 if there's something in this end panel that you want to always have on there even when you're in a different tab such as a add-on that you keep forgetting to turn on you can right click it and choose pin and then whenever you go into your other tabs it'll still be there tip number 98 the simplified check box allows you to set a lot of different parameters that can reduce the computational weight of your scene when you go to render it tip number 99 in the uv editor there's a selection mode called island this will allow you to select entire islands all at once just by using your selection key and then you can move them around and scale you do whatever you want with them and tip number 100 since this has to be important the default cube did nothing wrong to you he was just trying to save his family do you expect yourself not to make the same decision under the circumstances everyone says that they would have done differently but you know deep down that you would not the default cube did nothing wrong and does not deserve your constant hate and your constant deletion your constant liquidation i'm looking at you cg matter you're kind of you're pushing this issue further than it needs to go he's the prometheus of the 3d community and i will not stand by the wayside and watch him suffer these injustices day in and day out by people who don't even know what he's gone through people who would have done the exact same thing if that was them and you know what what are you gonna do when you're the default cube there's no one left to stand up for you with this default cube i send you to your final resting place not a day longer will you suffer from hypocrites and blender youtubers goodbye old friend i forgive you [Music] anyways tip number 101 if you press ctrl l you'll be able to link several different things between objects so one of those for the basic example is materials so that will link all of the objects that you've selected with the current active selections material tip number 102 another one of those options is object data one of the uses for this is if you accidentally press shift d a bunch of times and make duplicates of something that actually needs to remain the same and so when you go to change it it's not going to change all of them however if you then go and do control l link object data now when you make edits it's going to edit all of them at the same time and you can avoid deleting a whole bunch of duplicates with this tip number 103 there's a cool add-on called auto mirror which just sits on the side here and it's kind of like a more intuitive mirroring function it's just all it's going to do is add a modifier and then you have a bunch of options in here you could apply it for example and just use it as a symmetrize function and stuff like that is always nice to have up on the top here tip number 104 you can actually generate a grease pencil version of any image that you throw into the image editor tip number 105 in the viewport you can press alt b to create a clipping range it'll cut everything else out and just allow you to view whatever is within that clipping range tip number 106 if you go under viewport display and click bounds it'll create a bounding box around whatever your object is no matter its shape and you can actually change the shape of this bounding box into a sphere or a cylinder or cone or capsule tip number 107 i found this cool article that explains all of the blending modes in photoshop these are also used in blender tip number 108 this one is straight out of the video where i explained all the modifiers in blender which you should watch by the way but this is called the surface deform modifier and what it allows you to do is transfer the deformation of maybe a low poly object onto a higher poly object in this example i used a very simple plane on a cloth simulation and then transferred that over to a set of blinds which was higher poly allowing those blinds to be affected by a wind simulation to see the full effect happen go watch the video tip number 109 when you add a keyframe you usually press the i key and you'll usually choose from one of multiple keying sets now if you don't want to do this step and there's multiple other uses for this as well you can actually select the active keying set such as location or lock rod scale that's very popular so let's say it's location now i just moved over here press the i key there's the location for frame 44 let's just let's move it over here boom location very easy very easy eventually you're going to have some scenes that have a lot of objects in them and you should really stay organized but if for some reason you can't find the camera you can go into select and then select active camera tip number 111 you can map anything to sound by using a little function called bake sound to f curve first you got to grab something and keyframe it on the location key map then you're going to open up the graph editor you're going to go in there you're going to delete all the tracks that you don't need in this case i'm just going to use the z location for this ball here you're going to make sure your playhead is a frame one you're gonna go to key you're gonna go to big sound to f curves you're gonna pick the song you want and there you go now you can see that it is moving based on the sound but tip number 112 you can't actually move these right now and so for that you're going to need to use a little something i like to call object animation bake action just make sure that you delete all the extra tracks that are created and remember that you can scale and grab keyframes and now you've got an absolutely excellent audio simulation tip number 113 if you use a floor object constraint you can make the origin of one object not be able to go past the surface of another the benefit of this over a transform lock is that the floor here can actually move and so you can do a whole bunch of weird stuff with this tip number 114 mesh filters are pretty cool you can access them from the mesh filters in the sculpting menu in the active tool settings you can change the filter type there's a ton of them one of my favorite is smooth it doesn't really work with a brush you just click and drag and it applies the filter tip number 115 ies lamps are meant to mimic real world lights and you can plug them into a strength of an emission on a point light only in cycles with the ies texture node they're extremely cool extremely underused and tip number 116 you can find tons of them through this website ieslibrary.com there's so many in here that it would be absolutely impossible to search through them all tip number 117 here we have a cube with three segments that is smoothed without a smooth on here we have a beveled cube with something like 50 segments this is what this is supposed to look like but it doesn't now here's a normal cube so let's make this cube look more like this cube even though this cube is going to have more vertices in this cube add a bevel with two segments perfect now i'm going to go ahead and smooth this normals auto smooth go into modifiers add a weighted normal modifier and now this cube looks more like this cube than this cube even though this cube has more vertices tip number 118 when you're doing a loop cut one of the options that's going to be available to you is smoothness which can be used to add some curvature to your object you can change the falloff of this smoothness with this option right here tip number 119 when you're knifing an object you can actually press the c key and it will constrain your knife strokes to 45 degree angles this is especially helpful in hard surface modeling as it allows you to create some really cool angular shapes really fast tip number 120 let's talk about view layers you can create new ones by clicking this button up here you can choose what happens in this view layer by checking you're unchecking the collections within for instance you're probably going to want your lighting to carry over layer to layer but some of your objects you might want to switch between you should use these because when you render it out it's going to render as separate render layers and so you can change each of them individually and composite them very easily tip number 121 if you have node wrangler installed which you should you can press shift w and open up a whole world of options no wrangler does more things than just make viewer nodes for instance i could select all of this stuff and go to align nodes and it's just beautiful there's so much stuff in here and the best way to learn it is just to go through and test all of them out speaking of materials tip number 122 if you've got a bunch of materials clogging up your materials panel and you're not even using them anymore in your actual object you can go under this arrow and choose remove unused slots and it will get rid of all the materials that you're not using tip number 123 there's an option under view called viewport render keyframes and this is only going to render the frames that actually have an animation keyframe on them it's still going to output all of the other ones except it's only going to output them as repeated frames of the last one that had a keyframe on it tip number 124 you can actually batch rename objects with control f2 you can find and replace so right here i'm going to do cube and replace with box we'll do case sensitive and hit ok now you can see that all these objects have been renamed from cube to box now you can do this with as many objects as you want tip number 125 if your textures are not lining up on any given edge what you can do is you can actually try and stitch those edges together by pressing the v key hitting enter and it will snap the uvs right next to each other so that specific edge will be perfectly aligned tip number 126 make sure you have a blender add multiple ingredients into the what kind of milk is that place your hand on top of the blender finally press one of the buttons on the blender when nothing's moving anymore pour it into a glass container and finally for better smoothies use water and soap special thanks to our sponsor wikihow.com tip number 127 you may have noticed a new development category in the blender add-ons these allow you to do a whole bunch of things such as give you access to all of the different icons that blender uses and a lot more tip number 128 to snap your edges to the surface of a subdivided model or really view any modifiers effects in edit mode you're going to go ahead and check this box right here tip number 129 in most situations where you're dealing with a green screen the best node to use is the keying node you just plug in your node grab the key color and you should be golden it does all the color spill and all that stuff you might have to mess with the settings but overall this usually beats out the other keying notes tip number 130 do you notice anything different about this node right now well yes because i went and i hid the node sockets that are unused and the node options that are unused that's something you can do you can go in and if a node is taking up way too much space get it out of there tip number 131 if you're trying to maximize your space and this status bar down here is messing you up you can go to window and uncheck show status bar tip number 132 if you render minecraft stuff you can get all the textures for the game by downloading the client as a zip and then unzipping it tip number 133 remember when we talked about layers well you can actually just render one single layer at a time if you want to by going into the view layers properties and checking the render single layer box tip number 134 there is an add-on called node arrange let's see what it does to this massive mess of nodes oh that actually looks pretty nice now you can of course specify how all this is supposed to happen with all these different margins and options i think they could definitely improve this however by making frames interact more easily as you can see this frame is actually cutting into this uh this node right here and that's not that's not ideal of course tip number 135 collections are an excellent way to organize and reuse your objects i'm using collections for all of these individual characters over here as well as smaller objects such as this little piece of cat food tip number 136 if you click this button right here it will keep the entire uv map visible and it will sync up selection modes across edit mode and the uv edit mode tip number 137 drivers exist drivers are a good way to establish really complex relationships between variables or between objects the learning curve here is a bit steep but you can do some pretty cool things with them for instance tip number 138 this is something that you could do with drivers one of the most popular ones is to use the frame number as the driver so if you right click that and click copy as new driver you can paste it anywhere and it'll basically just copy the frame number so if you paste that into a value node and then do whatever you want with it with like a math note or something like that you could do something like creating an rgb gaming cube tip number 139 is an add-on called material utilities it's activated when you press the shift q key and it allows you to do several things such as assigning materials and cleaning up materials there's several other things as well but this isn't beta so i do expect it to get better over time tip number 140 most of the time hdri haven is awesome but sometimes there may come a time when you need to author your own hdri and in that case uh hdra haven has released a few articles on how you would shoot your own hdri and then there's also software that allows you to create hdris manually for totally custom lighting tip number 141 there's a cool trick you can do in edit mode under face just go to wireframe and it'll create a wireframe without the hassle of having to make a modifier and all that tip number 142 if you're keying something with a black background you don't want to use the keying note or anything like that and this goes for other stuff too but you're going to want to use a luminance key you'll need to edit the values a little bit but this is by far your best option when you're working with a black black ground tip number 143 there's a node in ev called the shader to rgb node it takes in shader data and outputs it as color data so you can create cool lighting effects and all sorts of stuff tip number 144 if you're making voxel models you probably want to use magical voxel not blender tip number 145 when you're uv editing there's a box under uv called constrained image bounce and this doesn't let you go outside the boundaries tip number 146 everyone knows about matte caps they're really awesome but sometimes the light might be the wrong way for you and if you click this little button right here it'll actually switch the way the light for the matte cap is going tip number 147 we talked about vertex groups before but did you know that you can actually select vertices if you're in vertex mode by going to select all by trait ungroup vertices and that way you can see which vertices on a mesh are not in a group tip number 148 down in the timeline here you can go under playback and choose limit play head to frame range this doesn't let you go outside of the one to 250 default or whatever you have it set at tip number 149 when you're sculpting or painting or anything that involves a painting workflow you can press ctrl r and it will do what's called a voxel remesh but it's really a great way to get face countdown you can actually choose the size of the voxel remesh by pressing shift r instead of ctrl r tip number 150 be sure to get your sleep uh sleep is really important it helps you it helps get rid of brain fog it helps you feel refreshed in the mornings some people like to stay up late and wake up late i for one have never been guilty of this actually uh i actually just don't sleep at all even though i'd really like to tip number 151 sometimes you won't be able to preview a data range well because it's outside of the zero to one spectrum you can use a normalized node in that case or really any of the remapping nodes now tip number 152 here we have the depth past essentially it's trying to find what is close and what is far from the camera in my compositor nodes video i did an example where we literally moved objects around in post-processing using the depth pass the black is going to be closest to the camera and then the white is farthest from the camera however sometimes it's not ideal if you look you can see that there's jagged edges along the sides here so tip 153 the solution for that is to use the missed pass first you gotta go into your passes enable missed then go to your camera viewport display and enable mist there then go to your world settings you're gonna find a missed pass setting it down in here you can set the starting point and then also the depth and so in that case the top of this would be black the bottom would be white interestingly not only does this one work automatically but it fixes those aliasing problems tip number 154 if you've got more vertices than you need you could actually do what's called a limited dissolve and that will get rid of geometry based on a max angle so if this had a little bit of displacement to it and we did a limited dissolve it would not get rid of that part of it because it does not fit into the 5 degree maximum tip number 155 one of the coolest effects out there with shaders is normal-based shaders you could put snow on top of a mountain you could put dust on top of a statue and then you could copy that material over to something entirely different and it still works even if you rotate it around a bunch of times what's on top will stay on top right here there are only colors but you could swap this out with materials and things like that so how exactly do you do it well you take a geometry node plug the normal socket into the vector socket of a separate x y z take the z plug that into a color ramp you're going to need that to customize it later plug the color from the color ramp into the factor of a mix shader and then plug the two shaders in that you want to mix in this case we're using the z but we could actually use the x or the y if we want the effect to come from the side or something like that tip number 156 instant meshes is a free program that does read apology automatically and it seems to be absolutely wonderful i'm currently in the middle of learning it tip number 157 there's some new snapping modes that you might want to check out including edge center and edge perpendicular tip number 158 render passes are absolutely incredible and you should spend some time checking them out some of the cooler ones i've already talked about like cryptomat but the cool thing is they're actually starting to come to eevee most of them have not been there from the start but now eevee is starting to get more and more render passes tip number 159 you can save render passes and changes in compositing to separate files all you need to use is a file output node and then on render it will write to these files whatever you instruct it to and so if you have auto render on for example whenever you make a change it will update the files tip number 160 blender nation is a cool blender news website you can usually find some cool effects that you haven't seen before like i mean like right here rim lights weapon rigging things like that usually i've noticed as tutorials that get posted on here but it's also a good way to discover new add-ons and texture libraries and things like that tip number 161 the wavelength node is a super cool converter node that actually translates a number into a wavelength color the single input nature of this makes it really easy to animate as well as to translate real world data tip number 162 in your interface here there's these little sets of boxes on the side here and you can use that to actually just rearrange different items in your menus for instance let me take lily's surface scraper and just slap that up at the top above preview and surface but just keep in mind you might confuse yourself so be wary of that tip number 163 in the viewport shading options under this arrow you can find render passes and so you can actually choose which render pass to view in the viewport and then to go back just go to combined tip number 164 blender has a lot of tools for making custom normals now one of those happens to be under the mesh normals and rotate and this literally just allows you to rotate the normals of your object tip number 165 instagram is a great place to get art inspiration and things like that it's a lot more than just a social platform tip number 166 the modifier tools add-on is pretty cool it's pretty lightweight it just adds a few buttons up here to either apply all of your modifiers uh disable all of them from the viewport or toggle whether they're supposed to be collapsed or not just some convenient stuff that should probably be there anyways tip number 167 you can actually parent objects to individual vertices not just other objects select your object select the other object go into edit mode select the vertex you want and then press ctrl p make vertex parent and now that object will be parented to that vertex tip number 168 sheep at render farm is a great place to get your renders made now the way that it works is you can choose to render other people's files to get points and then with those points you can order renders for yourself and even if you hardly have any points you can still get renders done you'll just be last in line teams are actually a really fun thing to get into on here my team is on the map ladies and gentlemen we just beat cg matter scotland sweden furries the game of minecraft tip number 169 have you ever subdivided something and went wait i didn't actually want to do that well there's actually an option for you called unsubdivide hit it and it will begin to unsubdivide however i've noticed that this is less useful for actually unsubdividing as it is for creating cool geometry patterns tip number 170 i've got yet another case for using alt d instead of shift d as you all know shift d creates a duplicate that you can edit separately what alt d does is creates a linked duplicate that you edit at the same time and so because of this it's just it's just an instance of this object you're going to notice that the tries here with both of them are just under 4000 however if we do shift d you'll notice that the tries in the scene register at just under 8 000. so not only is this easier for organizational purposes it's also much easier on your computer for my next few tips since the theme is like rare blender tips i wanted to show you some lesser known 3d model and texture repositories so the first one is 3d.si.edu it's the smithsonian 3d digitalization so you're going to have a lot of really cool stuff in here things like skeletons things like fossils things like statues and planes and the best part is it's all free to download and it's all cc0 tip number 172 texturebox.com this is a lesser known texture site and while there are so many texture sites right now this place is worth checking if none of the other places have what you want tip number 173 3db3.com now this is a 3d model library now i imagine this would be indispensable for architecture folks who just want to download i'm looking in the sofas category right now and not only are there some really cool and unique sofas there are entire scenes available for download now you want to talk about textures well i've got a 200 iq play for you right here for tip number 174 arkatonic.com i'm going to search for wood and let me tell you okay you're going to find the most unique textures for any sort of architectural material on this website because this this is actually how products get sold some of these are absolutely incredible and if nothing else serve for great inspiration tip number 175 if you've got objects that are left and right if you've got one side selected and usually they're going to be more complex you can go to select and mirror selection and it will select everything that is named on the opposite side like all the r dots instead of the l dots so this can be really useful especially when working with rigs tip number 176 have you ever wondered how to morph between entire objects well have i got the tip for you first add a cube then add a cone next add a shrink wrap modifier hit the cone as the target object next go into edit mode and hit this button so that you can see what you're doing scale the mesh up until it encompasses the entire cone and then hit apply shape key so now everything's ready you can delete the cone and then if you go into your object data you will have the shrink wrap as a shape key and you can move between that as many times as you want you can animate this you can do whatever you want with it get creative with it you could do multiple objects on one go or you could do some really complex objects tip number 177 the gltf file format is gaining popularity some people think of it as the next evolution of the fbx file format which some would argue is getting a little bit outdated and while the industry has not fully adopted gltf yet it doesn't hurt to get to know this file format tip number 178 face sets are a new thing when sculpting that allows you to sculpt everything except what is in that face set i personally like to think of it as a mix of the vertex group function and the mask function there's a lot of different ways that you can create face sets either that's by materials by normals maybe or by uv seams either way it's a new feature but i'm really excited to see what people do with it tip number 179 everyone knows when you hold ctrl you will snap but if you don't want to have to hold ctrl anymore you can press shift tab and that will toggle snapping so you can either just toggle it by pressing and letting it be or you could hold ctrl and that will snap it too for tip number 180 i wanted to go over object id and material id so these are things that can be used to distinguish between objects and materials in compositing as well as a couple of other things now to change the object in material id you're going to go into your objects and go to relations and that's where you will find the pass index and so by putting a pass index of one this will have the same object id as other objects that also have a pass index of one the same goes for materials under settings you'll find pass index as the first one and then under your passes you're going to have to enable object index and material index if you want to use them you can distinguish between your id layers by using your id mask node and compositing tip number 181 when you're in the shader editor and you have something selected you can press l and it's going to select all the things that are linked to that to the first level if you want to go back another level press l again and then it will select the next level of whatever is linked to whatever was linked you know what i'm saying tip number 182 you should animate your light sources sometimes notice how in this next scene the lights are flashing back and forth and how much of a cool effect that creates based on the context tip number 183 when you're in look dev mode you can change how the hdri is displayed by going under the viewport shading options and then you can actually change the world opacity you can change the blur if you want to the rotation even tip number 184 sometimes you make instances of entire collections all at once however this collection can be seen as not real as it's just an instance of this other collection if you want to make the collection real select it and then go to control a make instances real tip number 185 if you press the l key in the uv editor you can select linked just like in the 3d viewport now i've found this to be much faster than going up and choosing island select mode but i suppose it depends on the situation tip number 186 this just blatantly isn't really blender at all but i had this idea where i wanted to make lego sets right obviously you wouldn't use blender for that what you're going to use is something called stud.io it's made by the folks at bricklink and it allows you to create instructions as well there's also a photorealistic renderer built in this was a test i did that tell me that's not photorealistic tip number 187 if you're not into the whole hdri thing you can actually create procedural skies with a sky texture tip number 188 for these next couple i'm going to give you a couple different ways to outline a model with a mesh not freestyle strokes now the first one is to duplicate a mesh and then you're going to right click to send it back you're going to press alt s to scale it up and then go to alt n and press flip then you're going to go and add a diffuse bsdf that is entirely black and entirely rough now select that object on the inside separate it by selection get rid of that original material and add something else and then just make sure the back face culling is on and if you did it right you'll have an outline that can move along with the viewport however there may be an easier albeit less customizable way with a solidify modifier you go into add modifier solidify bring it out to whatever size you want flip normals mess with the material offset index throw on a subdivision surface and you should be golden now this works automatically now so that you can still edit the mesh and it's still there tip number 190 materialized from bounding box software is a program that will attempt to generate pbr materials out of a single image it's open source it's in the spirit of blender and its function is absolutely incredible tip number 191 so there's these tool options up here you've got mirror you've got symmetry and you've got auto merge they're all under this options box up here so the first that we're going to talk about is mirroring you can think of this kind of like symmetry and sculpt mode when you edit one side it's going to edit the other side assuming that they're symmetrical you can do multiple at once by shift clicking them and then we also have auto merge if you move a vertex into the same spot as another one it will automatically just merge with that vertex i think the holdout node is really cool it seems to turn an object into what is essentially an alpha mask tip number 193 looking into productivity apps and things like that is never fun i'm using microsoft to do and i know a lot of people that use trello tip number 194 you'll notice that in most modifiers there's a vertex group option but you might not use it a lot now the significance of this is that there are certain modifiers and things that affect the vertex groups and then there are certain modifiers that utilize these vertex groups so for instance right here what i'm doing is i'm modifying the vertex weights based on their proximity to another object and then by setting that vertex group up to affect the wireframe modifier you can create all sorts of really cool effects most of these relevant modifiers have vertex group options for tip number 195 i'm just going to throw up some various community links we're getting to the end here and it's getting to the end of what i will be able to offer you in this video so go forth and prosper tip number 196 there is a compositing node called pixelate however if you try to throw it in there you're gonna notice that literally nothing happens you're gonna need to add two distort scale nodes one before and one after plug in the image on both sides and at first you'll see no difference the idea here is that you have to scale down the image on this one scale node and then scale it up with the other scale node and that creates the pixel effect but i really feel like this should be part of the pixelate note itself because then when you want to change it you have to change four different variables and that's ridiculous tip number 197 you can change how uvs are displayed under view you can actually display it as a dash black white tip number 198 if you're ever curious to see what's coming up in blender you can actually look in there you can actually look through their road map they've got a road map published and it's definitely awesome to see what's coming up tip 199 if you have further questions feel free to leave a comment or you can reach out to me on either instagram or discord we've got a discord community with about 3 000 members on it and a lot of those people are really happy to help you out and finally after all these years tip number 200 be sure that you're staying creative especially during things like quarantine creativity can be a really good outlet for people when it's easy to lose the energy or motivation to do anything or even to wake up at all in the morning so stay safe everybody and appreciate those around you my name is daniel craft and without further ado take it easy everybody keep blending [Music] you

Channel: Daniel Krafft

Views: 156,944

Rating: 4.9832802 out of 5

Keywords: blender tips, blender, tips, blender 3d, blender cycles, blender eevee, modeling, 3d modeling, 3d, 3d animation, animation, blender help, blender tutorial, blender 2.83, blender 2.9, blender 2.82, 100 tips, 100 blender tips, how to, blender 2.8 tutorial beginner, blender tutorial 2.8

Id: fKH1XobKWnc

Length: 53min 38sec (3218 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 20 2020