Free tools EVERY BLENDER Artist Should Be Using

hey so every now and again I get a question about something really particular in a video that I didn't cover it's not intentional that I left it out it's just that I do so many little things in my videos that sometimes I leave little things out they seem so minuscule because I've been doing them for so long and that's what this video is going to be about it's going to be about all of the tools that I use daily that I just sometimes don't mention that I'm using because they're so ingrained in my workflow and they feel so necessary now there are plenty of videos made by plenty of YouTubers out there that cover tools that are useful from within blender however today we're going to be kind of stretching the term tool to kind of fit our needs a little bit because some of these things come from outside blender some of this is just super useful to Art and creation as a whole however some really good videos about add-ons have come out recently and won by a YouTuber by the name of stash who uh may or may not have used my glass Shader and his thumbnail so I'm a little partial so I am going to say you know go check out that video in the description however there are other YouTubers like ducky 3D who show off add-ons very regularly so I will leave a link to a few of them in the description but before we dive into everything I'm very happy to announce that this week's video is sponsored by skillshare skillshare is an online tool used to facilitate easy learning as well as exploration and discovery of new topics that you find interesting so when they reached out to me of course I was all over this the biggest reason for that is that I learned at a very young age that everybody learns in different ways and skillshare allows you to explore topics that actually interest you enabling you to learn new skills and hobbies in a way that's actually effective for you now for me personally I wanted to use this as an opportunity to look into some guitar classes and maybe finally learn how to play Hey There Delilah what's it like and well that's you know definitely still a bit of a work in progress I did actually watch this awesome class on geonodes by smeef and now I might actually be able to use geonodes in videos going forward but of course you're probably all aware by now that skillshare offers tons of classes in Creative Fields such as photography film and video editing but are you aware that they also offer hundreds of career Focus classes if you're feeling stuck and kind of burned out in your regular everyday life this could be something to spark that motivation to start working on things for yourself again find a career path that really suits you so why not take this opportunity to learn how to design a career to fit you and your needs want to learn how to be successful on YouTube there's a class for that want to learn about building a creative career there's a class for that want to learn about baking banana bread there's a class for that so of course skillshare hooked it up for all of you guys as well the first 1 000 people to sign up using my link in the description get a month for free so you know take advantage of it honestly so let's start with the things that we can do in blender first off have you ever been uh in a scene where something isn't perfectly centered and find that you're just orbiting around nothing in the center of your scene or maybe you're zooming in and all of a sudden it feels like you just you can't get close enough or you're getting way too close that is because by default in your preferences under navigation depth is turned off turn that guy on and now you will orbit around your object from wherever you Center click on your mouse you can also zoom in as far as you want to go and it won't take you through the object so you can get very close to the surface this one's a little bit dependent on you as a person however this one changed my workflow at blender forever I love this function another one that's super useful it's already in blender if you come over back to your preferences you type in extra you get extra objects and extra curves right so this gives you a ton more shapes to work work with within native blender one of which is the rounded Cube which is so so useful if you're going to be doing simulations it's so essential you also get access to all of these extra curves that are just turned off by default and some of these are crazy that they're so useful I don't know why they're turned off by default another thing that's turned off by default is blender's internal scatter function you could type in Scatter under add-ons and enable this now what you do is select the object you want to scatter then shift select the object you want it to be on press F3 to search and type in Scatter objects from here you can just draw the objects on and press enter and now you've got scattered objects wherever you want them again this is another one of those things that I have no concept for why this is turned off by default and hidden under the search menu this is so useful here's another one that's turned off by default which I have no idea why the ability to use nodes on your lights all you have to do is open up the Shader editor with the light selected and click use nodes now you might be saying why is that useful and that's because you can do things like create gobos with a simple setup like this that I got from a YouTuber by the name of wallaby Link in the description by the way you can create gobos within blender procedurally I know a lot of you know about this already but you can completely control it and it's so so useful dude I realize this isn't like really like a turned off by default but you do have to go looking for it and it's just ugh I wish it was more apparent I would have been using it years and years before I had started using it now that we've covered some things from within blender let's hop out of blender and talk about some things that you can use as an artist to just generally improve every project sometimes when I'm in a creative rut I just need a place to start on a project before my my creative juices start going and the best place for me to start every time is by picking a color palette and I'm going to show you two tools for this the first one is going to be Adobe color now Adobe color is set up by default looks like this you can go through and select a ton of different ranges of color palettes just like this however you can also come over to their Trends or their explore tab under the trends you can see why what color palettes are trending right now in certain markets which ones are being chosen by companies the most and being used actively so incredibly useful and under the explore tab are thousands of options that are either Auto generated or created by individuals for color palettes for your projects find a color palette that you like click on it open it up and you can see the hex code for every single one of them you can download them in all these different formats it's so incredibly useful the other color tool that I recommend is coolers now I don't use this one as much but a lot of my friends do and very highly recommended it to me and this one comes with apps for IOS and Android you can use it in figma the Adobe extension it's got a ton of different options here and it works as a generator so what that means is you can come in and just randomly generate colors and it will pick them for you there's an easy little tutorial to follow along on the site in case you're nervous about how to use it it's very easy and super super useful now if you've been following me for a little bit you've heard me talk about this next one quite a bit and then this qixel bridge this is an asset lab library that is free to use I think there are some stipulations around using it in paid work if you're not working in unreal however you could still get the assets for free for any software so if you go to qixel.com forward slash Bridge Link in the description you can just download the application once you have it downloaded you're going to see this right here and you're going to be prompted to sign in what you're going to do is create an epic games account and sign in with epic games once you are signed in you have access to hundreds of materials and hundreds of models that go in high poly to low poly that are incredibly high quality it even comes with the ability to link to blender so that you can just click the object and then click import to blender however you do have to change that with every updated version of blender and since blender updates so often I don't do that I just choose to download the model and I keep them on my computer so let's say I want this manhole cover I've already got it downloaded right if I come over to my downloads folder I've got a folder called Bridge we can go to downloaded 3D and inside here what do we have it's under Street sidewalk I'm not sure why they could be weird namely sometimes named weirdly is what I wanted to say yeah I can talk but as you can see I've got it right here two clicks and there it is I've got it and like I said they have tons and tons of materials and models it's so good you should be using this in the same vein something that you should be doing if you're not already is navigating the blender market and going through websites like gumroad and just looking at the free asset libraries that are out there so many people want to see artists succeed and grow and do better for themselves so there are so many things that are available for free odds are if you've got something in mind that you need a little bit of help with whether that's clothing or materials or you know add-ons or objects modeling whatever someone out there has probably already done it and uploaded it for free or for cheap oh speaking of free and or cheap who is that but some of these websites offer even more than that one of them being sketchfab now we've all heard of sketchfab before we've all downloaded models from here but something that you probably don't know or don't think about is that sketchfab is so so good for references whether it's 2D or 3D you should always be using reference and sketchfab has an incredible model viewer where you can view very expensive very high quality models for free from any angle and it's great for taking reference let's say you have an assignment where you're working on human anatomy and you need something from this pose here it is you got it you pose your guy right then you set it up take a screenshot and this is what you're going to be working on if you're sketching 2D Anatomy or whatever this is so helpful and I've done this so many times when I can't afford a higher quality model or I can't find exactly what I'm looking for it's super useful I like this one a lot we've done a lot of talking about internal tools and production but what about your pre-production pre-production is arguably just as or more important than the project itself if you don't have a good foundation for your project then you don't have a good project so that's why I'm always using storyboarder storyboarder is exactly what it sounds like it is a free storyboarding software that is so so useful and I have used it on many professional projects now I'm not much of a doodler as you can see here but it got the job done when I was showing this to people that were working on the project with me like hey this is what I want to be doing it can also help you fully conceptualize your idea make you think about elements that you hadn't thought of when it was just sitting in your brain you know what's the motion gonna be like what's your lighting going to be like where's your camera going to be positioned at this all helps you kind of visualize that before you actually start production another great bit of pre-production is using references and for that I almost always use prf prf is a free software that allows you to download images and then kind of drop them onto your desktop and they will be projected over whatever application you have open right so with prf all you do is download it open it up and it might not look like it's open but it is I can just drag and drop an image onto my desktop like this it's a little bit big so we're going to zoom it out a little bit I can drag it up here let's say oh it's not enough I also want this image for reference right so we're just going to drag and drop a bunch of images and we have these overlaid on our screen you can move these to another monitor if you don't have another monitor you don't shrink them get them out of the way and it's perfect reference that's just up on top of any program you have open it's so useful oh you know you could use it to just like add a little friend yeah get that now the very last tool that I can offer you is something that is a little bit corny but it is probably the most useful tool there is and that is stop being afraid I know it's easier said than done but join communities reach out to your favorite creators and be like hey man how did you do this I want to know how you did this thing and odds are they're gonna reply because creators we do what we do because we want to see others succeed we enjoy the field we're part of we love art and artists as a whole so don't be afraid to reach out obviously they're going to be times when creators don't feel comfortable to respond or they just don't want to and that's fine too you know don't take that as rejection just take it as hey they're doing their own thing and joining communities is so helpful to your growth as an artist you know in my Discord we have people talking all the time just coming in being like hey what do you guys think of this and every time somebody responds they're like oh yeah this is cool I like this you know maybe fix this or maybe change that maybe work on this kind of thing and I've seen growth happen in front of my own eyes in my server like I said it's a little bit corny but genuinely I think it's the best advice that I can give you thank you so much for watching as always and thank you very much to my patrons for continuing to support me and any project files we've seen of 3dr in this video are going to be uploaded to my patreon by the way it yeah thank you guys for supporting me I'd say the same thing every video but I do I sincerely really appreciate it thanks so much for watching everyone and I will see you all again real soon

Channel: atti

Views: 63,567

Keywords: Editing, animation, #3d, #blender, #render, #b3d, #abstract, #scifiart, #surreal, #3dart, #design, #mdcommunity, #renderzone, #illustration, #adobe, #graphicdesign, #artdirection, #octanerender, #behance, #styleframe, #motiondesign, #motiongraphics, #houdini, #satifying

Id: Msz2G8wwXwc

Length: 11min 44sec (704 seconds)

Published: Wed May 03 2023