Blender 2.8 Setup | The changes we make and why

hi 80 boys here we try to keep our changes to an absolute minimum to let as many people follow along as possible but we'd be mad not to make any changes whatsoever and it would inflate every tutorial by 10 minutes to explain where and why the changes are made so here's a quick overview of the changes we tend to make and then we'll go over the why will make everything slightly more readable by upping the resolution scale of the display to 1.1 in my case anyway for the quality of the wireframes we'll op the multi sampling to 8 and just a quick addition here if you don't really rely on this kind of interactive navigation we can actually switch it off here or we can just come over and change that to a simple axis and therefore it takes up far less screen space the navigation smooth view will set to 0 for those instant zoom ins Auto depth is a controversial one but sometimes we'll have that on for rendering on the GPU will often be set to CUDA with everything checked there if other options besides CUDA are available then enable whatever you can they're basically for rendering speed ups to take advantage of the GPU we'd switch over to that device for modeling though we'll often find ourselves in the workbench engine we might give a little color to a material for the viewport display typically we'd want to use our own workspace instead of setting one up every time so duplicating and naming one is a good idea then we'll just keep the windows we need in the workbench solid shading the metal studio lighting option is quite nice and bright and for the workbench rendered view we might go with a slightly shiny madcap option the shadows will put down to zero point to the cavity will set to both and for screen space the ridge will put to 0.3 and the valley will have a 0.6 will enable the outline the background we might slightly lighten and to unify all the viewing modes will change the background option to world that might have a knock-on effect so lightening the grid slightly could be necessary their back face culling I like to have on in both the solid and the rendered modes and when in evie for that matter that setting can be found in the material itself for toggling the wireframe we assign a shortcut to that and we're using the semicolon key for add-ons will enable the loop tools add-on the copy attributes add-on the bool tool add-on and make sure display wireframe is set on it will enable f2 and no tutorial would be complete without mentioning the node Wrangler and generally import images as planes add-on comes in handy for many jobs too so that's a quick summary that we hope you'll find useful when following along with us and maybe others for that matter so now we'll go into more detail and share some hints and tips along the way most of what we want to tweak here is going to be found in our preferences so let's jump into it we comply in preferences at the bottom of the Edit menu there or we can find it at the bottom of our F for file context menu in both of those cases it opens up a floating window sometimes I want to tweak the Preferences not in a separate window and just keep the cursor focused all on the same version of blender so to do that I'm going to split this 3d view here just by left-clicking and dragging towards the left just to duplicate the 3d view and then instead of a 3d viewport let's change it to preferences if you're opening a blender version for the first time you'll probably be greeted with a few options that we can find in our key map tab of the user preferences things like which key map to use which we're just using but the standard blender one we're now selecting with the left Mouse and we also get an option to what to do with the spacebar and there's also a theme option which we're just going to keep as the standard default theme jumpy bats the key map though just a quick note about the spacebar action for hard surface modeling for a project like that you're probably not going to be doing much animation so to have that set to play might not make that much sense maybe it would be better to have it as tools or search instead but I just wanted to make it clear that all three of those options are still accessible through quick shortcut keys anyway so as we can see here spacebar will play the tools we can bring up with Shift space that's just a reflection of our tools file that we have here for the search that is going to be found on f3 so personally I'm going to leave these as default here I just want to add a little quick note to do with any of the user preferences that we actually change in here are going to get automatically saved that's because of a setting that we can find here in this section here we just click on this and you see autosave preferences is enabled by default so we want to be changing things around in here and we don't want that to happen we don't want to save those changes we can uncheck that and they just manually do that ourselves with save preferences all right so with all that out of the way let's get into some changes so first of all with our interface tab the resolution scale I'm going to take that up to something like 1.1 just to make it everything a little bit easier to read but again this is personal preference depending on how far away your monitor is and things like this also bear in mind that is possible to hold ctrl + middle click and if you move the mouse up and down you'll be able to scale individual panels there next a little note about reach and overlap back in the older versions of blender this wasn't on by default but now it is and you can see if we take that off our side panels such as the toolbar and this sidebar itself will kind of clip part of the 3d view there whereas if we enable region overlap we get a little bit of extra space next jumping down to viewport we can see we have this multi sampling area set to no multi sample at the moment just to demonstrate this a little bit clearer I'm just going to close out our side bars here delete this cube with X and add in a mesh monkey instead and then let's come over to wireframe mode and then zoom right in on this and hopefully you can see this area here has these jagged lines now if we set this from no multi sample to multi sample eight that should try and smooth that area out and just give a nicer cleaner overall look next let's jump down to the navigation tab and currently we have this smooth view set to 200 that's the time it takes to zoom into something when you select it so to demonstrate the current speed of our smooth you let's go up to view and then just choose frame selected or use the period key or full stop if you'd rather on the numpad if we set that right down to zero instead everything is just a little bit quicker and snappier auto perspective is also on by default now what this means is if we go into our front orthographic view by pressing 1 on the numpad and then begin to use the middle mouse to rotate out of that view you can see it automatically switched us into a perspective view now personally I really like this since you can still toggle orthographic and perspective with the 5 key on the numpad as I'm doing there but if you don't like that behavior this is where you'll find that setting auto depth is another controversial one but it's very very useful to know that it's there so with this disabled as it is by default the position of our cursor is really gonna affect where the pivot of the camera rotating is going to be since this monkey is the last thing that we've selected we're rotating around this and if we select the camera we're still really rotating around the monkey that is until we view up on it frame selected and now we're going to be rotating around that this auto depth allows us to be able to use the position of objects underneath that cursor to inform that rotation point so what I'll do is I'll press it 5 on the numpad just to switch back into perspective mode there and frame up on this camera by pressing the full stop on the numpad or the period if you rather and as you can see we're rotating around that and as soon as we place our cursor over the monkey there you can see we're starting to rotate around that point and generally helps for navigating around the scene but it can get a bit annoying so it's definitely worth knowing that that option is hidden here in the practices and you might want to toggle it on and off depending on your circumstances next up jumping over to the system tab we can take a look at our cycles rendering options here so depending on your graphics card will depend on your options that you've got available I've got a g-force and NVIDIA card so I can enable a scooter here there's also the option to recruit in our CPU here to get even further speed ups so I'm going to enable that there and then once that's done we can actually close out the user preferences so I'm going to left-click and drag from the 3d view top right corner into the Preferences and just close that out and that means that we can now come to our render tab in our properties window switch over to cycles here and now we can switch from CPU to GPU and get some rendering speed ups and that would usually mean that down in the performance section we would need to change our tile sizes to benefit the tiles those little orange squares darting around and a spirals constructing our image usually rendering on the CPU would mean smaller tile sizes give better render times and the GPU would mean a larger tile size so I wasn't really sure what the best tile size would be for trying to use both at the same time so I ran a few tests rendering out this very simple cube seen many times with different combinations of tile sizes and put the results into this simple chart the main takeaway is that for using the CPU and the GPU at the same time the optimal setting was around 64 this is also true for the CPU on its own but if just using the GPU on its own then probably somewhere around 256 is still best for this title size setting so in my case because I'm using the CPU and the GPU I'm gonna stick to around 64 all right let's talk more about render engines in a modeling project it's usually unlikely you'd use much of cycles though you may like to switch to that for final presentation renders however a VFX project set in space on the other hand that's using a lot of lighting and shading you may find yourself much more in cycles or perhaps a real-time engine and in blender 2.8 that would be eevee eevee mode gives us lots of post-processing options and gives us a similar ability to create elaborate materials using the shader editor why are still set to Eevee we have access to the solid shading mode we can also get to these options using the Zed key see we're currently in the solid shading there's solid shading viewing mode doesn't demand as much resources to display what we need on screen but still this solid shading in itself has lots of useful viewing options that we can see in the shading pulldown menus that brings us to the workbench engine which removes a lot of the fancy evie rendering power but keeps us light and fast while modeling even cycles a material preview mode has now disappeared we now just have these three options though to understand what's going on here it's probably best to just think of the rendered mode here like a second solid shading mode where the settings can be found in the render tab of the properties window rather than the pull down in the shading menu we switch over to our solar shaded and show that pull down a lot of those same options here are basically duplicated here so we can kind of just think of our rendered mode just like a second solid shading mode it also means if we jump over to our materials that the material settings are super simple and removed any of the evie or cycle specific settings there while we're here let's make a simple color change and set our material to a type of blue this should show in both solid shading mode and in our rendered mode which is just really as we would say in just like our second solar shading setup one difference between rendered and solid shading in the workbench however is that our color management if we find that in our renders tap and come down to the bottom here call it management is only going to affect our rendered mode also notice that our view transform now is set to filmic by default so we're currently in rendered mode so let's press Z then come over to solid shading mode change this to high contrast maybe increase the exposure we have further settings here if we wanted to use curves and as you can see none of that was being updated in the viewport there but if we press set and go over to rendered mode you can see our exposure is definitely kicking in here so I'm just going to set that down to zero maybe try something more medium in the contrast and here we can see some basic changes between our rendered and solid viewing before making further changes here I'm going to make mention of these various workspace taps along the top which are various windows layout settings and modes designed for certain tasks we began on the general layout tab but I'd like to duplicate that and just alter a custom workspace so I'm gonna click on plus here and duplicate the current one which is currently called layout or one when I double click in there unless say we're making a hard surface modeling custom layout so let's just call it that but obviously name that to whatever you would prefer and for this we're not going to need this second window here we don't need the timeline or the shader editor for our modeling so I'll just choose to go from the bottom right here and left click and drag down until we see this large arrow pointing into the shader editor let go and then we can collapse out into a larger overall 3d view instead of beginning with a mesh monkey let's delete that with the X key press shift a to bring up our add menu and I'm going to bring back our faithful dependent cube I'll also come over to the materials and from the pulldown bring our material back it's gonna call this blue and then hop back over to our render settings here so now quickly I'm gonna go and walk through two different viewing looks one set of values for solid shading and another set of values for rendered mode so for example in solid shading we could use perhaps from the studio lighting setups this one here just a little brighter and if we switch over to rendered view we could perhaps use one of the Mac caps switch to Matt caps and then from here perhaps this one will give us some good results to demonstrate in the next thing I'm going to duplicate this cube with shift D and just move that along the x-axis and then move over to it tap into edit mode press 3 to switch to face select select the top face press I to inset and then e to extrude down and then alt a to deselect everything then tap back into object mode I'm still in rendered view so it's these settings which are controlling what we see here and something that we could do is add on our shadows but just lessen the impact of that a little bit so take it down to say something like zero point two so we can just see some shadow outline here we can play with the orientation of that by clicking on our little cog icon and then left clicking and dragging on here I'm just gonna more or less leave that as it was and for solid shading mode or just leave it without again another option for a rendered view could be to add a kind of ambient occlusion to this back in 2.7 that used to be hidden somewhere in the sidebar but now we have it actually in the shading options themselves as we can see under cavity if I uncheck that again you can just look to see into the creases here that it'll darken when we enable the cavity option again the strength of which is controlled with our valley setting here and we also have this Ridge setting which is basically the exposed corners many areas that you might expect to have been slightly worn away I'm just gonna set these down to be a little bit more subtle at 0.5 and we can also control the type so I'm gonna set this to both so that we're using some screen space settings and we'll space settings will see the screen space Ridge settings just gives us a very tight precise kind of slightly chipped away edge there which is quite cool so I'm just gonna make that quite subtle at 0.3 and for the valleys again we get a very tight dark line in there and I'm gonna set that to 0.6 and then if I deselect with alt a we can watch for the very outline here and potentially use our outline option just to help separate objects away from each other so if I shift D to duplicate that there and then toggle our outline we can watch for the intersection of these points here and with that enabled we get a little bit of separation there which is pretty handy so I'm just going to extra delete that and leave the outline setting it on and then we'll come to the background so if I was to take this into wireframe by pressing Z we can see how wireframe is black since we don't have it selected so I'll say just to keep it deselected for the moment and then let's switch over to our world tab and take a look at the viewport display I'm just going to set this to be a little bit lighter well only slightly though when you see it's not actually gonna have any effect just yet if we were to switch into rendered view we should be able to see that having an effect as we can see there so I'm just gonna leave this R on around 0.3 and for our solid shading mode it's going to reset that back to our theme settings by default but if we use our pulldown menu and set the background from the theme to the world that should unify our viewport background in world tap there between solid rendered and wireframe just a quick note if using the grid quite a bit you could see that they're having a light of background makes that harder to hop the contrast isn't as great so it's worth bearing in mind that without preferences here we can still tweak many things in our theme so if we come on to the 3d view the grid is actually the first thing we can see and if we really wanted to we could really crank that up into a much brighter setting again many of these things are obviously personal preference it's also worth considering how things are looking in edit mode so I'm selecting the cube there and tapping into it mode it's worth noting that the way this shades we can see here our viewport overlays and we're also showing our faces which I'm just going to leave on for now as that will also help us to display the fact that we have our X ray here as well which you pretty much always want on when you're in your wireframe mode we can kind of see that just here as well allowing goes to select through the mesh I'm going to jump into solid shading mode just to demonstrate this next thing which is back face culling so I'm going to delete this face here as you can see we can see through the mesh we can also see the reverse sides of our polygons that are facing away from us here and one way to demonstrate that is to come over to our shading here and you can see back face culling is an option and now it's fairly clear which way our polygons are actually facing personally I think this is so important I quite like the idea of having this set also in rendered mode back face culling it's also very important to bear this in mind for other rendering engines as well just a quick note on this if we do jump into Eevee for example let's switch over to the material preview we can definitely still see our black faces there so let's get about cooling and that in Eevee is handled on a per material basis so if we select our materials tab and then find our settings you can see there's back face culling per material that's just a quick aside or a similar option that we might like to use in Eevee at this point that might be all the things that we want to do and change with the scene and so what we might like to do at that point is just come down to our file menu come down to our defaults and then save this as our startup file that way each time you load blender all of this stuff is going to be set up for us let's take a look at some of the add-ons that we might enable come bundled with blender so again these couldn't be found in our preferences so I'm gonna hit f4 there and take a look at the add-ons tab and we could filter the list of add-ons here in a few different ways so we can use our categories here or we could use a text filter I'm going to type in display because display tools was one of the main add-ons that we used to use in 2.7 but as you can see that is not there so I'm going to remove that and just close this again now the main reason we used that display tools really was just because it gave us a very easy way to toggle a wireframe on and off for everything and in this version of blender we're not really gonna struggle being able to set that up quite quickly and easily ourselves so to show that I'm going to give this a little bit more interest so tapping into edit mode right click subdivide a couple of times and then let's go shift a and add in a cylinder for example let's press G and move that off to the side and now if we come over to our viewport overlays menu we can see down here we have a wireframe toggle that we can switch on which is exactly what we want but we don't want to have to keep digging in a menu for that we want it on a hotkey so one thing that we could do here is right-click and add it to a quick favorites menu and that means that we can hit Q and then we'll find our wireframe toggle within that menu that's not perfectly ideal though because that quick favorites menu is context sensitive so I tab into edit mode and press Q again it says no menu items found so I would need to add that in again so what I'll do is tap into object mode I'm going to come over to this pulldown menu I'm going to right-click and then remove it from the quick favorites and right click it again and instead assign a shortcut and now we can just simply press a key and for that I'm just gonna use the semicolon key and now when pressing the semicolon key it should toggle that on pretty easily and then even if we're in edit mode we can toggle a lot on or not again with the semicolon key as you can see in this other object another add-on that we found very useful was the layer management add-on but again that doesn't seem to be something about that we need to worry about anymore since we have all our collections set up since we have a more versatile system with the collections so for example we can easily name what all this is about and then select the main scene collection press C and that will add in another collection which I can just double click on and give a name to keep things organized and then we can just select the object press em to move it into any of these collections or create yet another one and something particularly cool about this sort of stuff is that we can left-click and drag them to reorganize the structure and create sub collections which means the level of organization that we can get out of here is pretty useful now something we can do is use our filters here at the moment we can just see this eye icon we actually also enable many other options here for example whether it's going to be rendered or not and that will pop that up on the right-hand side of our outliner and we can just disable or enable various different collections that we have two really useful stuff there there are some add-ons though that we used to use in 2.7 that we would again still use in 2.8 for example the loop tools add-on so let's just enable that there and we can close that out again now if I select this cube tab into edit mode right click you can see at the top there we've got our loop tools one of the ones I particularly like on here is if we just press one select that single vertex there right click go to loop tools and then create a circle you can see it's fashion the surrounding vertices into a nice circular shape for us all right let's take a look at another add-on for example the copy attributes add-on this is still gonna be found in 2.8 so I'm just going to type in coffee into the filter there enable it and this works just as it has done in the past so for example we can go ctrl C and we're gonna get our copy attributes menu most of this is all grayed out because we need to select two objects so I'm just gonna make something a little bit different on these so with this I'm gonna come over to the modifiers for example give this a subdivision surface as well as a bevel perhaps let's put the bevel first why not and then what I'll do is select the cube shift select the cylinder go ctrl C and then copy selected modifiers and it's gonna choose from the cylinders modifiers that we've got let's say we just want to only take the bevel modifier and then just click OK if we take a look that's exactly what we've got so that's particularly useful for copying a lot of mirror bevel subdivision modifiers that you've already got set up on one object and you just want to quickly pass that on to another are particularly useful add-on for hard surface modeling is to come and find our boolean related add-on the bool tool so just have this enabled there and then that means that we can take one object I'm gonna press G and then ship Z just move that to intersect with the corner of this cube ship select the cube and then go ctrl + - on the numpad and then as we can see there we're creating a difference operation there in our boolean modifier and it's all automatically set up for us so it's also changed our cylinder object into a bounding box there as well so let's take a quick look at what's happening there we can come over to our object properties come down to the viewport display you can see that set there to bounce what we could change that to say wireframe instead if we wanted and so that brings me to another point which is if we want to tweak that a little bit we can open up our add-ons open up the options here and in our options here we can choose to display as wireframe instead of the bounding box also we can see the various shortcuts available to us here so I'm just going to close that out and add in a UV sphere this time drop that over to this corner instead ship select the cube control - on the numpad and as you can see it's switched it to a wireframe instead of the bounds this time another quick note to add about the bool tool is that we can find some extra options in our sidebar so I'm going to open that with the N key pop down to the Edit tab that we've got down the side there and we can find this section here to do with this particular boolean brush as it calls it and we can toggle the visibility or the effect rather of that particular boolean object or brush and this should be very similar if we select the cylinder over here but if we select the cube we'll see are two different brushes affecting our mesh here and we can change the order of them we can toggle them on and off and we can decide to hide them or apply them all just to potentially simplify things down for us another add-on now we can get to is the f2 add on this is another good modeling at all so I wanted to enable that there tap into edit mode on this press 2 to grab just these two edges there shift select it and then shift D to duplicate them and I'm just going to move them down on this y-axis just to separate them from the main mesh really and now if I press want to switch into vertex selection and then just select that one vertex there this is all we actually need for - to know how to create an entire face out of this so if I just press F now and then cancel the transform by pressing the right-click you see it's created a face for us so this is basically just giving us extra function on top of our already cool fill command that we would get with the F key normally another add-on that isn't strictly modeling related but it's just so important it's always worth pointing this one out and it's to do with shading in this case the node Wrangler but it's worth noting that this isn't going to work because we're in the workbench engine so I'm just going to switch over to the Eevee engine just to demonstrate this and press F or load up the Preferences let's find an old Wrangler add-on just make sure it's enabled because this is going to give us so much more control and features and tools and shortcuts for that matter whilst working in our shader editor here for example if I select this principal be SDF shader and press ctrl T it should automatically create some useful nose for us and hook it into the right socket this image texture though I don't want so I'm gonna actually switch it with shift s another little option from the node Wrangler there let's change that from an image texture to a noise texture we can see it's effects in the viewport there rather than seeing the shading though we can very quickly show what any node is doing by just ctrl shift clicking on it so ctrl shift click there and you'll see the grayscale output of this noise texture or if we wanted to see what this texture coordinates node was doing we could control shift that and that will automatically hook it to this output viewer and again same with the mapping node all of the you know it is really it's just a temporary emission shader and we can get rid of it quickly and easily by ghost ctrl shift clicking on the shader this add-on clearly does much more than that and it's definitely worth checking out some of the shortcuts here to really see how this can benefit your shader experience we our node wrangling alright our last add-on here is going to be the import images as planes add-on so we want to go f4 and take a look at our add-ons and then just type in images here just make sure that this is enabled and then once we've got that in place that means that we can then find an extra option in our import menu the images as planes at the bottom there or we could go shift a add in an image images as planes that gives us all these options on the right-hand side here first of all we just need to find some kind of image or actually a movie why not and then also I'm gonna make this shadeless and a cool thing about this add-on is it's going to bring it in and recognize the dimensions of the footage or the image and conform mesh geometry plane into that same aspect ratio so let's press G and then move that out away scale that up and now it's ready to go on just place it in the background of whatever you need in this case and this even happens to be a movie so I can hit space and we can feel like we're in space that's the animation plays so that should wrap up this blender 2.8 setup video many thanks for watching this is 80 Burroughs and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Aidy Burrows 3D

Views: 13,548

Keywords: Blender, blender (software), free, tutorial, video course, hardsurface, modeling, Blender 2.8, b3d, course, how-to, gleb alexandrov, aidy burrows, creative shrimp, update, aidy, gleb, setup, workbench engine, gpu, cpu, Addons

Id: 18pEnEB6_-s

Length: 28min 12sec (1692 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 31 2019