Blender tips, Blender secrets, Blender hacks. So let’s get started. Voxel art - those blocky, Minecraft-Lego-looking
renders - are pretty popular. In Blender you can give any object this look. Select the object and add a Remesh Modifier. There’s an option at the top for “blocks.” Check that and voila, you’ve got voxel art. Change the depth and the scale to affect the
size and density of the voxels. You can even animate this. And when you apply the modifier it actually
changes the mesh into blocks. If you want to randomize the animation of
anything, for example the movement along the Z axis of this object. Give it one key frame for the thing you want
to animate. Go to the graph editor and let’s select
the channel for Z location. Press “N” to open up a sidebar in the
graph editor. Go to modifiers. Add modifier. Noise. It give us a noisy, random animation along
the Z axis. Increasing the scale will tone down the craziness
of the animation. Changing the strength will adjust how far
it goes in both directions. This works on anything that can be animated. Here I just used it to flicker the strength
of this light. A quick way to give a different look to your
renders is to go down to the bottom of the render properties tab. Under color management, find “look.” There are different levels of contrast and
usually adding a little to a scene makes it look a lot better. The good part is you can render your image
once and then change these to test out the looks without rendering again. You can create an instanced copy of an entire
collection. Put objects into a collection by pressing
"M” and “New Collection.” Give the collection a name. Now, Shift+A to add a new object. Choose “Collection Instance.” Then choose your collection. It creates a non-editable copy of the collection. This uses a lot less data in your scene. And any changes you make with the original
collection, either by moving the objects or editing them, will be updated instantly in
all collection instances. There are probably actions you use in Blender
over and over again, like subdivide. Well, you can add them to your quick favorites. Here’s how. Next time you use the action, right click
on it and select “Add to Quick Favorites.” Now whenever you’re working, you can press
“Q” on your keyboard and your quick favorites will be right next to your cursor. The favorites are specific to edit mode and
object mode, so each will have its own favorites menu. The quick favorites feature works in the shading
editor too. Press Shift+A and find a shader that you use
often. Right click it and choose “Add to Quick
Favorites.” Now, whenever you’re in the shader editor,
just press “Q” and select the shader you want from your favorites list. The line art modifier is a way to add 2D line
art over a 3D scene. Shift+A to add an object. Choose Grease Pencil - Stroke. Move the stroke out of view and with the stroke
selected, go to add modifier. And Choose Line Art. In the modifier settings, choose Source Type
- Scene. For layer, choose colors. For material, choose the color you want the
line art to be. Just like that, you have line art over your
scene. It’s important to know that line art displays
from the view of your camera, so have your camera set up where you want it before you
do this. There are a lot more settings and options
for the line art, so I have an entire video dedicated to this if you want to check it
out. I assume most people know about the array
modifier and how it can make copies of an object and then display them in an array. But I think an underused piece of this modifier
is “Object Offset.” You select it and then select another object
to use as reference, usually an empty. Then the array will copy the offset of the
object. What this means is every iteration of the
array will be scaled, moved and rotated however the referenced object is. Let me show you. If I move the referenced object, each iteration
of the array moves by that much in that direction. If I rotate it, each iteration is given a
compounding rotation. And if I scale it, each step in the array
can get bigger or smaller as it goes. And a really cool part is I can animate this
by animating the changes to the empty object. Play around with this and I bet you find something
cool you can use it for. Or just use it to make a spiral staircase. When you create an array, like this fence
here, you can run into a problem at the end. There’s no last fence post. Select the vertical post portion of the fence. Duplicate it and make it its own object with
“P.” Now, in the array modifier, expand the tab
for caps. Choose “End Cap” and select the fence
post object. It’ll add whatever object you have selected
to cap off the end of the array. You can randomly move, scale or rotate multiple
objects in Blender. Select all the objects, then go to Object
- Transform - Randomize Transform. A box opens up in the bottom of the viewport. You can individually randomize their movement
along each axis. You can randomize rotation on each axis and
the same for scale. If you check “Scale Even” then it’ll
scale all three axes evenly. And you can choose different randomizations
by changing the seed value. The wave modifier adds procedural waves to
an object effortlessly. It needs a lot of geometry to work with. On a plane, we can subdivide it a whole bunch
of times and go to Add Modifier - Wave. Play your animation to see the wave. There are lots of options for the wave. The falloff is how far the waves will travel
before they, well, before they fall off. Height is how high the waves are going to
be. Width is how far apart they are gonna be. And narrowness is the narrowness of the top
part of the wave, if that makes sense. Start position allows you to adjust where
the wave originates. Or have it originate based on the location
of another object. Time settings adjust the start time, stop
time and speed of the waves. And lastly, you can add a texture to your
wave for more detail. I found this takes a lot of geometry and slows
down the animation though. But it can make your wave look really cool. It doesn’t just work on planes. You can add it to just about anything. Even text. See what I did there. If you have made it this far, consider giving
the video a like and subscribing for more Blender stuff. If you want to have hanging wires or cables
in Blender, there’s an easy and free way to do it using curves. Go to preferences and turn on the add-on called
“Add Curve: Extra Objects.” In object mode, select the two objects you
want to create a hanging curve between. You can only do it between two objects at
a time. Press Shift+A to add an object. Choose curve and down at the bottom, find
Knots. Then choose “Catenary.” A drooping curve will be created between the
origin points of the two objects. In the options panel that opens in the bottom
left of the screen, you have options. Steps are how many vertices the curve will
have. The “A” value is what’s really cool. It will adjust how much slack is in the curve
and how far down it hangs. You can change the bevel radius to give it
some thickness. There are a few other settings to play around
with here too. Add some empties to your scene and go crazy
with hanging cables. You can draw curves on the surface of objects
with the draw tool. Create a curve. Tab into edit mode. Delete all the vertices. And turn on the draw tool. In the sidebar, under tool, you have a lot
of settings. Change the depth from cursor to surface. Give the curve some bevel in the curve settings. Now, draw away. Pretty cool, but if you really want to have
fun with curves, check out the “Cablerator” add-on on Blender Market with a link in the
description. It’s my favorite add-on for curves. Checker deselect is handy. Let’s say you want to select every other
face on this plane. Select them all and then go to Select -> Checker
Deselect. This little options box pops up in the bottom. You can tell it how many faces to leave unselected
between selected faces. And how many faces to select in a row. Then you can offset it if it’s not where
you want it. It’s really easy to picture this on a flat
plane but it works well on other shapes too. I used to spend a lot of time individually
selecting faces on cylinders to extrude. Well, checker deselect solved this problem. Select Random is like checker deselect’s
cousin. It works in either object mode or edit mode. In edit mode, go to select -> select random. It randomly selects either vertices, edges
or faces depending on which selection mode you’re in. In the options box you can change the ratio
which defaults at 50%. And you can quickly pick different randomizations
by adjusting the seed value. In object mode, it will randomly select among
all visible objects, so hide what you don’t want to be a part of the selection. The controls on the bottom work the same way. Blender packs a lot of things into one screen
and it makes the icons and UI really small. If you want to make the interface larger,
go to Edit -> Preferences and under “Interface,” you can increase the resolution scale. One is normal, but you can make it as big
as you want (or smaller for that matter). In Blender, Import Images as Planes is a very
useful add-on, but did you know you can also import videos as planes? This may be even more useful. Make sure the Import Images as Planes add-on
is turned on. Press Shift+A -> Image -> Image as Plane. Navigate to the video you want to import and
bring it in just like you would an image. Now, in the shader editor, there are options
to control what frame you start the video on. And you can check “Cyclic” to make the
video repeat. This can be an easy way to add steam or other
elements to your scene. By the way, I got this steam element and a
whole bunch more from Ian Hubert’s Patreon page. Ian Hubert is awesome. You may want to lock an object’s transforms
so they don’t change location, rotation and scale. In the sidebar, also known as the “N”
menu, you can lock each individual axis. But the real tip here is you can select one
and then drag all the way down across the ones you want. Nine clicks turns into one. And the same thing works to unlock them. Pretty cool. You can connect an external image editor like
Photoshop to Blender. Go to your preferences. Under file path and applications, go to “image
editor.” Navigate to the .exe file of the image editing
software of your choice. For me, I found Photoshop.exe where it’s
saved on my computer. Now when you’re in your image editor and
you have a texture or image loaded, you can go to Image - Edit externally. Now this will only work if the image is actually
already saved outside of Blender. Your image editing software will open. Change whatever you want and save the file. When you go back into Blender, to update the
image go to image -> reload. You can tell a camera to remain focused on
an object using a “track to” constraint. Select the camera. From the constraint panel, add object constraint. Choose “track to” under tracking. In the target box, choose the object you want
it to focus on. Now if we animate the camera to move across
the scene, it remains pointed at the Suzanne. The influence is how much this constraint
pulls the camera toward the target. You could fade this effect in or out by animating
the influence. Interestingly, you could use this in reverse
and add a “track to” constraint to an object but list the camera as the target. Might have to tweak some of the axis settings,
but now wherever you move the camera, the object will turn to face the camera. The monkey keeps staring at me. A really quick way to aim lights in Blender
is to select the light and press Shift+T. Then just point your cursor to aim the light. It works with sun lamps, spot lamps and area
lights. Normally when you have an object with a material
on it, and you try to extrude your mesh, the new mesh’s textures are all messed up. But in edit mode, you can go to the options
in the top right corner and check on the box “Correct Face Attributes.” Now, when you extrude your textures on the
new geometry look right. It doesn’t always work though. When extruding out perpendicularly, the textures
are still screwed up. In that case, you can manually edit the textures
in the UV editor, or just UV unwrap everything again. Navigation in Blender can be weird. You can get lost in 3D space. One thing I’ve found helpful is locking
the view to my 3D cursor. It’s in the sidebar or the “N” menu
under view. Check lock to 3D cursor. Now, your viewport pivot point and where you
zoom in and out of will always be your 3D cursor. Which you can move around as desired. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but I really
like it. If you’re tired of changing the same settings
over and over again for every project, do this. Open a new file. Change what you want to be your default settings. I’ll change render engine to Cycles with
GPU compute, my resolution, render samples and I’ll lock the view to 3D cursor. Now go to File -> Defaults -> Save Startup
File. Next time you open a new Blender file, these
settings are already the defaults. Alright we’re half way there. This one’s not just for Blender but it’s
really for anyone who stares at a computer screen for a long time. Blue light from screens makes it more difficult
to fall asleep. I started using blue light glasses an hour
or two before I go to bed and I sleep way better. There are fancy and expensive ones, but I’ll
link to cheap ones that I use in the description. Better rest equals better art. If you are looking to model with precision
or match real world scale, Blender can easily display various measurements for you. Go to the overlays drop down box and you’ll
find a section for measurements. Edge length is probably the most useful but
you can also turn on angles and area. The measurements show for whatever you have
selected in edit mode. In Blender, shape keys are a way to deform
a mesh from one position to another and then animate the deformation. They can be used for a lot of things including
facial animations. To use them, select an object. In the data properties panel, there is an
area for shape keys. Press the plus icon to add your first shape
key which defaults to the name “basis.” This will remain the base or starting shape
for the object. Then, add another one and it’s called “Key
1.” With “Key 1” selected, you can enter edit
mode and move your vertices around to create your new shape. Don’t add any new geometry though. Then in object mode, you use the value slider
to change between one shape and the other. You can add multiple shape keys to an object
and you can blend more than one of them together. You can animate this slider value by hovering
over it and pressing “I” to add a key frame. It works well in sculpt mode too, but in sculpt
mode you need to have the key selected and you have to have the slider value all the
way to “one” or it won’t work. Whichever shape key you have selected is the
one you’ll be editing when you make changes, so make sure to pay attention to which one’s
selected. I have a longer video that goes into more
on Shape Keys. Link in the description. Adding custom bevel profiles in Blender is
easy. When you add a bevel in edit mode by pressing
Control +B, open up the options panel that displays below. Increase the number of segments so you have
more to work with. The shape slider tweaks the shape of the default
bevel. But down at the bottom, you can change the
profile type from “Superellipse” to “Custom.” Then you can click on this line and add points
and drag them around to customize the profile of your bevel. And you can change the handle types to change
how pointy parts of the profile are. And, under presets, you have a handful of
options like stairs and crown molding. All of which you can continue to customize
to your heart’s content. Here’s a quick one. Naming objects in Blender is super important. A fast way to do it is to just select the
object and press “F2.” A box opens up where you type the object’s
new name and press enter. Way easier than trying to find it over in
the collections. The Decimate Modifier is used to reduce the
amount of geometry on an object with only minimal impact to its shape. Sometimes you buy or download a model with
just way too much geometry and it slows down your computer. Photoscanned models are the worst. So you can add a decimate modifier. The ratio is what percentage of the geometry
you want to remain. Even cutting it in half can make a big performance
difference without affecting most models. Unlike other modifiers, the decimate modifier
won’t allow you to visualize this in edit mode. But you can see in object mode if it’s going
to distort the shape. Turn the ratio up if it is. Then, apply the modifier and the mesh is reduced,
or decimated, as it’s instructed. The skin modifier is interesting. Start with a very basic object like a plane
and add a skin modifier. It adds a weird skin around the lines of the
mesh. You can select vertices and extrude them out
into shapes. Then you can select a vertex and press Control+A
to expand or contract the width of the skin at each vertex. From the modifier panel, you can smooth it
out around the branches and give it smooth shading. Then you can even add an armature to it for
rigging with a simple click. What users do is use this to create the basic
outline of a model to sculpt it. Once you apply the modifier, you can have
a basis to start sculpting. Lots of uses for this if you get creative. Blender’s gotten a lot faster at rendering,
but a lengthy animation in Cycles can still take a long time. One option is to use render farms. There are many out there and each work a little
differently. But basically, render farms are services that
allow you to upload a Blender file and use their servers to render your animations much
faster. The first time I tried one, I used Garage
Farm and I made an entire video about the process from a newbie’s perspective. Check it out if you’re interested. I wish I found this one out years ago. In Cycles, you can use negative values for
lights to remove light from an area in your scene. You can’t slide light power values below
zero, but you can type in a negative number. Instead of projecting light, it’ll remove
light. If you give the light a color, it’ll remove
that color from the spectrum. It works on point, spot, area and even sun
lamps. It does not work in Eevee though unfortunately. In Cycles, you can add textures to your lighting. It works well with point and spot lamps. Select a lamp and go to the shader editor. Click the box that says “Use Nodes.” Increase either the emission strength or the
power under light settings. If you have node wrangler activated, select
the emission shader and press Control +T. This adds an image texture and mapping set
up. Change the texture coordinate from UV to normal. You can select an image to use in the image
texture node. You can also choose a video which is pretty
cool. Changing the radius of the lamp will change
how blurry the light is. All the other light settings work as normal. Instead of an image texture, you could also
use any other texture set up, like waves, musgrave, voron-, voroni, voronoi or whatever
that word is. Mix and match them all you want just like
you would with other materials. When you’re texture painting in Blender,
you can create color palettes to use. Under brush settings, open color picker and
color palette. Press plus to create a new palette. Use the color picker to choose colors you
want in the palette and hit the plus icon to add that color to your palette. You can quickly choose between these colors. Or, open an image you want to use colors from
inside of your image editor. Go to Image - Extract Palette. Now in your palette tools, click the browser
icon and a palette has been created with the name of the image. Select it and every color from that image
has been put into a palette for you. Blender 3.0 introduced Cycles X, which is
a much improved version of the Cycles render engine. And it changed how sampling works. You used to just choose how many samples to
use. But now, you actually have a few different
ways of doing it. First, and this is turned on by default, you
can choose a noise threshold. This tells Blender to keep sampling until
it gets the noise down to a certain point. Lower values have less noise but render for
longer. But, you can also tell it to stop if it gets
to a maximum number of samples. And you can give it a minimum number of samples. Below this, you can even tell Blender to stop
sampling after a certain number of seconds. If you uncheck “noise threshold,” you
can give it a set number of samples like in previous versions of Blender, but can also
give it a time limit. Leaving the time limit at zero means there
is no time limit. Denoising in Cycles X works great, but a little
tip is to make sure that your GPU drivers are updated. The fast and powerful upgrades of Cycles X
only work with the newer drivers for GPU’s. The Blender Asset Browser was introduced in
Blender 3.0. It still needs some improvement but allows
you to quickly drag and drop objects and materials into your scene. It’s supposed to eventually support much
more. It’s a little tricky to set up though so
I have a step-by-step tutorial video on it. Dynamic Sky is an add-on that comes shipped
with Blender. To use it, turn it on under the add-ons in
the preferences. Under “create” on the sidebar, open dynamic
sky. Hit “create.” Then go to your world settings. Next to the world, there’ll be a drop down
box with an option called “dynamic_1.” Select that and now you have a custom world. You can change the sky color, the horizon
color, cloud color, cloud opacity and cloud density. You can also control sun color and strength. It creates a pretty complicated node tree
for you, but gives you all the controls right here. Real Snow is another add-on that comes already
installed with Blender. Turn it on in the preferences and it can add
a fairly realistic snow effect to objects pretty fast. Select an object or multiple objects you want
to add snow to. The control will show up on your sidebar menu
and only has a few options. The coverage is what percentage of the top
of the object you want covered in snow. The height is how tall you want the snow. Or you can go into edit mode and individually
select the faces you want to have snow on. Then check “selected faces” and it’ll
only add snow to those faces. It even adds a fairly realistic snow material
to the snow. The snow is added as a new object but it’s
parented to the object underneath. So if you move it, the snow moves with it. The add-on is called “Real Snow” and if
you have Blender, you already have it. When you select multiple faces and inset them
using the shortcut “I”, by default they inset as one face. While you’re insetting them, you can press
“I” again to toggle back and forth between treating them as one face or as individuals. Then you click to set the action in place
like normal. The next time you inset, Blender will default
to whichever way you left it. Poliigon is the Blender Guru’s site where
you can buy high quality materials and models. But if you just create an account they have
a lot of free stuff too. One of the coolest things might be the Poliigon
Material Converter. It’s a free plugin you can install that
adds this material converter to your materials panel. Pick a folder where you keep your materials. Then pick a material and choose “Load and
Apply.” It puts the material right onto your object. But wait, there is more. Open the shader editor and you see all your
materials are connected neatly using just a couple node groups. All the controls you’d want to adjust are
right here. Scaling of the texture, roughness, normal
strength and color adjustments. This is the default “Simple UV Mapping”
node for Poliigon. But with the addon installed you can also
swap this out for the Mosaic node which is really cool. When you have tiled textures, at some point
you can start to see the tile pattern. This Mosaic node breaks up that tile pattern. The material converter works with non-poliigon
materials as long as they follow the same naming conventions. I like Poliigon, I use it all the time and
I’ve got an affiliate link for it below. Create a free account and go check it out. The floor constraint allows you to let one
object act as a floor for another object. I’ll add a plane and a cube. Go to the constraints panel. With the cube selected, add object constraint. Under relationship, choose “floor.” In the target box, select the object you want
to use as a floor, in the case it’s the plane. Now, if we lower the cube, its origin point
will not go below the plane. If we want it to be more like a true floor,
we have to put the origin point at the bottom of the cube. If you don’t know, you do that by placing
your 3D cursor on the bottom of the cube. Then choose Object -> Set Origin -> Origin
to 3D Cursor. Now the cube will not go below the plane at
all. There are a few controls on the restraint
to play around with. A cool one is “use rotation.” With this selected, you can rotate the plane
and use it to kind of push your cube around. It’s gotta be useful for something. One way to move around your scene in Blender
is the walk or fly mode. To use it, press Shift+Tilde. The tilde is the squiggly line usually at
the top left of a keyboard. Now you’re in walk mode. You use W, A, S and D to move forward, backward
and side-to-side. Move your cursor around to look in different
directions. Just like in video games. E will take you straight up, Q will bring
you straight down. Clicking anywhere will take you out of walk
mode. If you do this while in camera view, it’ll
move your camera along as you move. It’s a great way to make small adjustments
to your camera angle. If you go to preferences, under navigation,
you can change from walk to fly mode. Fly mode works a little differently and when
you move in any direction, it keeps moving until you stop or change directions. I like walk mode. A way to add interesting lights to a scene
in Blender is with IES lighting. IES lights are files that tell a lamp how
to distribute light. Unfortunately they only work in Cycles right
now. You can find thousands of free IES files at
IESLibrary.com. Find a light you want to use and click “Download
IES.” In Blender, add a point lamp. Go to the light properties and select “Use
nodes.” Go to the shader editor and add an IES texture
node. Select external on the node and navigate to
the IES file you downloaded. Plug the factor of the IES texture into the
strength of the emission shader. You’ll probably have to tweak the strength
setting a little and you can change the color output of the light. These are way more interesting than default
lights in Blender. Maybe you want to keep notes in a Blender
project either for yourself or for someone else that you plan to share it with. Blender has a text editor you can open in
one of your workspaces. Find the text editor under scripting. Press “new” to create a new data block. Now you can type notes or whatever else you
want. It will default with the coding syntax for
scripting. Under view, you can turn off “syntax highlight”
and the number lines if you want. Now it’s just plain text. Under text, be sure to save your text data
block. You can name the data block and you can create
multiple ones. You can also click the folder icon and import
a text file from a program like WordPad. If you do, consider going to “Text” and
choosing “Make Internal” so it’s saved inside of Blender. One last thing, you can even take the text
from this editor and turn it into a 3D text object. Go to Edit - “Text to 3D Object” and then
either “One Object” or “One Object Per Line.” Mixamo is a free service from Adobe that offers
over 120 characters you can use personally or commercially. They also have about 2,500 animations you
can give those or other characters. Pick a character, then pick an animation and
choose “Download.” You can choose to export as an FBX file, which
you can easily import into Blender. There’s also a Mixamo add-on for Blender
that does some cool things. If you want to string multiple animations
together, you’ll use Blender’s nonlinear animation, or the “NLA Editor.” By the way, I’ve got an entire video on
this process step by step. Check out the link. In Blender, you can import Scalable Vector
Graphics or SVG files. Just make sure in your preferences, you have
turned on the add-on called “Import-Export: Scalable Vector Graphics.” On a side note, if you want to convert an
image into an .SVG file, there are websites that do it for free. I have found Convertio.co works well. When you want to bring in an SVG, go to File
-> Import -> Scalable Vector Graphic. Navigate to and choose your SVG file. Depending on your file, it’ll probably bring
it in as several different curve objects. If you select them all and join them with
Control+J, you have one curve object. Now, go to Object -> Convert -> Mesh. And you have a two dimensional mesh in the
shape of your SVG. You can extrude it out to make a 3D shape. Great for creating 3D logos animations. I really enjoy syncing animation to sound. What helps is to see the wavelength of the
audio. You can do this by bringing in an audio clip
to the video sequencer and lining it up where you want it. Select the sound clip and go to the menu on
the right. Under source, check the box for display waveform. It also helps to go to playback settings in
the timeline and turn on audio scrubbing. Go back into your main workspace. Either replace the timeline at the bottom
or drag up a new editor window. Change this to “Video Sequencer” and make
sure the option box says “sequencer.” You can go to view -> zoom and zoom in so
the waveform is nice and big. Now, use the sequencer as your timeline. With audio scrubbing turned on, you’ll be
able to hear your audio too. As you animate things in your scene, you can
line them up with the audio you’re trying to sync it to. Really cool. Say you have a scene with lots of materials
but you want to render the entire scene with one universal material. I’m sorry this only works when you’re
in Cycles. But when you’re in Cycles, go to the View
Layer Properties panel and all the way down at the bottom, expand “Override.” Choose the material from your scene that you
want to be your override material. There you go, lighting is all the same but
every object has this material. To go back to normal, just clear out the “override
material” box. Boid Particles are intuitive particle systems
that can be given a lot of instructions on how they move around. There’s a lot you can do with them, but
to get started add a particle system to an object. Leave it as emitter and change the lifetime
of the particles to like 500. Increase the render scale of the particles. Under physics, change from Newtonian to Boid. Hit play and that already is pretty cool. But you can go down to “Boid Brain” settings. Here you can give the particles different
rules on what they’re supposed to do. Remove “flock” with the minus button and
add a new rule with the plus button. Choose “goal.” Then under object, choose another object in
the scene. Press play and the particles will follow the
target object. There is so much more to cover here, look
for a full length video on Boids.
