Optimize Blender: custom startup file

[Music] did you know that every time you open blender and start a new file it's actually opening a pre-made file called the startup file so i'm going to show you how to make a bunch of changes to the startup file save over the old one and you'll have a new optimized starting point basically for blender so that every time you open blender you won't have to do the same settings or optimizations ever again it's a huge time saver and a way to be more efficient when using blender alright well let's get started in the preferences so go up to this editor type menu we're going to select preferences at the end let's go from the top down so first go to the animation and select linear this means that whenever we make keyframes is going to be a straight line instead of a smooth curve i personally use linear more often because i like to loop things and make you know constant moving objects like traveling moving spaceships things like that so for me i like linear move on down to add-ons i'm going to give you some really great add-ons you need to make sure and enable pretty much all these are already built into blender 2.83 which is what i'm using right now so let's start with the first one is auto tile size so just type in auto in the search and hit the check mark this will improve the tile size for your render settings and it does automatically again saving you time next one is loop tools type in loop enable that next is bull tool bool tool this helps with boolean number four is auto mirror now this actually is one that does not come with blender you can get it for free just look up auto mirror blender add-on and uh just mirrors your mesh adds a modifier and cuts off the half you don't need thus saving you a lot of time next is images as planes this allows you to import an image and it pops into your 3d editing area as a flat image with the texture mapping and nodes already set up and there are some really great options at that import screen when you get there next is fbx import so if you plan on importing and downloading models from sketchfab or you know any kind of 3d website sometimes they are fbx format which is pretty popular so you want to make sure that's checked on looks like it already is by default so that's good next is ant landscape if you plan on making any kind of terrain worlds maps things like that you're definitely going to want to have ant landscape and play with it lots of cool options and presets another great node that will save you a lot of time is the node wrangler so just type in uh node wrangler right there turn it on it will allow you to preview individual nodes temporarily and then go back to normal mode it will also give you some presets to apply you know image textures to a principled shader and some really quick mapping nodes to a node so i use it pretty much every time i make a material one more is extra objects okay there's actually two here extra curves and extra mesh this gives you a bunch of really fun objects to use and play with in your modeling and they're just great to have okay so that's it for the add-ons let's move on down to the input section this is a really important area this first one emulate numpad if you have a smaller laptop that does not have a dedicated number pad on the right you only have the normal numbers you know one through zero up above your keyboard letters and you're going to want to turn that on that allows you to use those numbers up there for the different camera views so check that on if you don't have a numpad if you have a notepad you don't need that next is emulate three button mouse so i use a laptop for all my work and it has a trackpad without a third button on the mouse and i don't use a mouse so if you probably could tell that from my other videos i don't use a three button mouse or nor do i have a scrolling wheel so i have to check this which allows me to hold alt and left click and drag around to kind of rotate my view so uh definitely check that on if you're only using a track pad or a stylus a stylus tablet which i also use for editing let's look at this mouse drag threshold and tablet drag threshold so this refers to when you click on an object whether you're using left or right click and you want to select the object well sometimes you may have found that it actually moves the object and i don't want that if i want to move an object i'm going to use the g key and move it x y or z but i don't ever want to click and drag and move something that's just not my style so with the mouse drag threshold that's when you're using the mouse or a trackpad on the laptop which is what i use and the tablet drag threshold is like it sounds with when you're using a stylus and a tablet so i'm going to set my mouse threshold a little bit higher i'm going to put it at 80 because i find that when i'm using my trackpad i more often will click and drag accidentally while i'm just trying to select something because you know your finger kind of rolls across the trackpad but the tablet for me is a little more precise so i'm going to put that at 50. so that way i don't actually move something if i do want to move it i can i just need to move you know past that threshold of 50 or 80 pixels this also applies for nodes when you're connecting two nodes with woody with wires or these are actually called noodles you have to get past a certain threshold so i'm clicking and holding right now but that noodle will not appear until i get past that's probably 80 pixels or 50 pixels i don't know which one it's using but if that number is really high you got to go all the way out here and then it appears and that's super annoying so that threshold will also affect the the nodes and personally i feel like that should be a separate setting but hey i'm not making blender and it's free so can't really complain so that's what those two numbers are for make sure to set them to a number that you're comfortable with okay next let's move on to the key map section this is a big one right here i personally prefer the old school right click to select objects it was really weird when i started but i totally got used to it and now i don't want to switch so left click to select or right click that's up to you space for action can play the animation you can go to tools or search i like search because that way i can type in anything and call it up so i'm going to select search because that's my personal preference all right move on to the systems tab and select your gpu if you have one and if you have two here select both of those i am not running uh 2.9 so i don't i tried optics and it doesn't work currently um so i'm just going to stick with this that which does work here's your undo steps i would just turn that up a lot maybe a hundred you never know you never know what you'll need to undo uh so there's that move on to the next tab save and load this is a really big one please please please please please check auto save temporary files just do it and set your timer to one minute because a lot of work can be done in one minute i used to have it at five minutes and boy was that a mistake i i lost so much work when blender would crash my computer would crash my kid would ruin something and you just never know so autosave is awesome make sure it's on and put it as low as you want my personal preference is one minute and lastly here's all the folder paths for different things like your textures your scripts your temporary files your fonts which is well that's already set see windows fonts okay so we're done with the preferences let's go up here and do save preferences and there's also an autosave which i guess is already on but uh just just for the heck of it do save preferences and let's go back to our 3d editor which is a 3d viewport all right let's move on to some more fun stuff now we got all the back end things done let's hit the letter in to bring up this little sidebar and go to view here are the view camera options so that what i'm looking at right now is a 50 millimeter you know emulated lens and the clip start and end is really important let's put this at dot zero one and then end do like a hundred thousand million something big and what that means is if you have a really large scene that goes beyond that boundary it's gonna cut it off now maybe you want that i'm not sure if that actually saves you any memory or processing power um but that's the cutoff point and i've had really large scenes like if i import a file that's just ginormous and i kind of stick with that scale i keep everything big and i get used to that there's a cut-off point at the end and it's really annoying or if you zoom in really close to something and you still want to see the detail you know you'll see this cut off i'll show you what it looks like i'll put this at one meter so as i zoom in look at that it's already cutting off because this corner this cutoff area is one meter from the the view if i do 0.5 it's a little bit less if i zoom in again there we go we get the cutting i just don't like that so i do 0.01 so you can get in really close to these tiny little minor details and not have that annoying cutoff you can press n to get rid of that view let's go over here and start with our very first tab over here which is the render settings i'm going to expand this a little bit to make a little easier to see so just put your mouse right in the middle drag it out and we're going to start with the ev settings and then we're going to do the cycle settings and the cool thing about blender is that it will remember you know what we do for each even though we switched out of them when we come back it'll already have all the ev specific settings you know still there and that's great so uh we're going to check off a few things here i'm going to turn on bloom because i like bloom if you don't you don't have to turn that on turn on screen space reflections that basically allows reflection reflective surfaces with materials i'm going to turn on motion blur because i like that go down to shadows turn on high bit depth and soft shadows is checked that's good next go down to film and check transparent if you want your renders to have a transparent sky or background if you do that kind of render where you're going to use this somewhere else and composite it in photoshop or you know maybe it's a video overlay then you'll need that transparent set if you want the black or the hdri or the you know whatever background you've set for the skies then leave that unchecked so um i kind of will go back and forth but for now by default i'll just keep this unchecked but i just want wanted to let you know that's where that is if you want a transparent background you will of course have to save your resulting image as a file that supports transparency jpeg does not so if you're doing that stick with uh png and make sure it's rgba which is alpha all right collapse film let's go down to the very last one which is color management this is a great one make sure filmic is selected here and the look um you know this is really up to you you can have a low contrast for a higher dynamic range or a higher contrast for more crunchy gritty looks i kind of like just a little bit past the medium point and you can even do curves if you really want to down here if you check it expand it there we go got a curves window i don't use that so keep that closed all right now we're done with the eevee stuff let's switch to cycles so right there all right now first i'm going to turn this to gpu compute for more efficient renderings go to light paths and set the total to eight right the rest of the stuff pretty much stays the same again if you want to do that transparent background just check transparent right there and at the very bottom we still have the filmic you know settings here for the contrast and exposure gamma um so we're done with the render settings let's move to the next one which is the output settings so here we've got our default resolution render right now it's just set to a typical you know um hd video size and this is our render size so i like to have it at 50 so that my very first initial renders are half size because honestly i'm not viewing a render full screen i just don't i render it and i look at it and say okay i'm good i'll make some changes and as i get later in the process then i'll start doing full screen or 100 or maybe just for my final render it'll be 100 but to save time uh do a 50 size render i personally usually make animations longer than 250 frames so i'll just put this to 600 and frame rate this is up to you i kind of like 30 i'm still getting used to 24 but you can set your frame rate right there okay this is a default output folder so if we click this open um it's going to open and it can basically tell you where to render video files and images to so again i'm going to find my blender files folder right there all right and let's set up a few defaults here so png i'm going to keep rgb a the a is for alpha now let's switch to jpeg and put our quality at 100 and let's do our video setup ffmpeg is the file format for mpeg videos make sure it's rgb click encoding and change container to mp4 h264 is good so this is a bit of a contentious area because most serious blender artists that render videos they're they're real big on never rendering an mp4 or even a video file at all they all say you've got to export as a png frame sequence so if you've got a 600 frame long animation now you've got 600 png images to deal with and it's true it retains quality and it can retain alpha which is great for compositing but i just don't do like serious video work i just want to see an animation i don't really do post work on my stuff right now um so i'm okay with an mp4 i don't think it's really that big of a deal personally so if you want to do a quick and easy mp4 if you want to be like professional and have all that extra space used up select png and you can you can render an animation sequence of png images all right so i'm going to go back to png i'll just leave it there i've been lately saving my renders as png just to retain a little bit more quality and alpha if i have it it is a better quality format than jpeg so there's that here's a cool little hat go down to your metadata add a note and just add your name daniel grove copyright so that when you save your images if you send it to someone you never know just a little added level of detail there it's got your name embedded in the image all right we're done with uh the output settings let's go to our passes tab um i'm going to check mist so that i'll have that missed passed when i use it and i'm going to check emissions environment shadow and ambient occlusion so that i'll have those already available when i do a final render just on the odd chance i want to render one of those individual passes and use it later it's already there and i don't have to re-render it it just saves you some time check denoising down here and the amount is up to you i just leave it at default personally all right two more tabs and we're done this is the scene tab i'm going to decide on my units you could do metrics or imperial ak american and all the details down here that's up to your preference and last but not least the world setting i always like to make my background pure black when i do these renders i just i just don't want a medium gray it's ugly you know i might set a sky texture or hdri that i want visible but that's the step later but by default i just want a black sky let's go to our outliner window which is this guy it shows you all the objects meshes lights and collections in your current scene you can also have multiple scenes let's turn on a few options here to make editing a little quicker and easier let's turn off the eyeball and turn on the screen also the camera icon now what these do is if i click on the screen the object is not just hidden but completely disabled so that saves computing power if you got high poly assets and you know really busy pack scene turning uh the screen on and off i've been told will save your computer a little bit of power whereas the eyeball just hides it and but it's still being processed so i'm i'm starting to use this more often and of course the camera will tell blender to actually render that object sometimes i have an object that doesn't need to be rendered you know maybe it's a scratch object or it was like the first you know prototype is something i don't want to delete it yet but i don't want it to be rendered just turn off the camera and there you go also make sure this is set to view layers that's my personal preference i like to see um you know the way this is laid out with the view layers option checked and last thing this is a really nice uh hack that i explained in my previous video about the edge worn the edgeware shader if you go to your shader editor press n to get rid of that shift a to add a node and in the group area i don't have anything here but normally in my actual like true startup file that i really made i've got a whole bunch of node groups there that i've made and some of them that i've got online that do a bunch of really fancy fast stuff for me and i never have to do those nodes ever again because the node groups are saved let me load up my actual startup file and show you what that looks like okay so this is my actual startup file that i've customized and i've been using for a while and you may notice i don't have a default cube i got rid of it a long time ago and never looked back although right now i am because i need an object to show you how i do these shader groups so let's make a cube go to your shader editor right there and i'm going to uh go to my material tab make a new material all right so here's a great trick for your startup file load in or amend all of your favorite node groups so that they will all be here in your node group drop down and this is awesome i've got a bunch of really complex node groups that do all kinds of cool things for me and save me so much time when i'm making uh you know materials and i want to do something really quick or i know that this is the look i'm going for and i just don't want to think about it you know just plug it in and boom it's done i can tweak and modify here you can find a whole bunch of great node groups and shaders like this online for free and also some really good ones you can pay for but import them save them and make sure to hit this little shield which protects it from going away this as a fake user which means even though i delete this default cube in the 3d viewport the material will not be deleted as well it has a fake user so it's hanging around waiting for me to use later on a new object if i go back to shader editor i can apply that material and it's there as are all of my groups that i have saved in here for later use so um yeah that's probably one of my favorite startup tricks right there is because it's kind of adding asset management to blender that it does not have along with having node groups preloaded into your startup file to save you time with node creation and procedural textures if you do the same kind of work repeatedly it's a really good idea to actually just go ahead and make your base materials or your starting most simple materials that you feel like you're going to use or build off of and just save those too uh preload those into your startup file so that when you start up you'll have them ready here i just made a gold aluminum dark metal a dark plastic and a rubber because i pretty much use those when i'm making lightsabers and other sci-fi things a lot and of course i can modify and do it or whatever i want but it's just a really good time saver to have those ready now to make sure that these stick with the startup file without having these cubes present make sure to hit this little shield button which means fake user so all of them have a fake user so that when i delete these objects the materials are not userless which means they'll get deleted when you close and reopen the file so let me delete these remember they have fake users so i should be able to pull them back here they are all my materials ready to be used and that's just more time saved so here's a material with five different image maps all pre-mapped where they need to be you can leave these blank or you can have an image pre-loaded but i normally have these all blank so they're ready to load images into they've got all the noodles connected and any other tweaks and things you want to put in the middle it's just already there ready for you to use okay so let's finish this video by showing you how to actually save this as the new startup file so once you've done all your preferences your add-ons your layout you know your materials and other things you want to do go to file defaults and click save startup file and that will basically overwrite whatever you have currently and all those changes will be saved next time you close and reopen blender it's all there for you i hope this saves you as much time as it has me and helps spur on your creativity to make new amazing things in blender let me know if you appreciate this video and if you learned anything while watching it down in the comments below thank you so much please subscribe and we'll see you next time so that is it i hope you guys enjoyed this video i hope you learned some great tips thanks for watching be sure to subscribe to my channel and watch all the other great videos i've got on here a lot of good information for uh intermediate and novice users let me know what you thought about it in the comments again thanks for watching and have a great week

Channel: Daniel Grove Photo

Views: 5,272

Keywords: blender, blender addons, optimize, optimization, CGI, 3d software, blender 3d, blender hacks, digital art, custom, presets, render, blender tricks

Id: h5UOahwIASc

Length: 20min 17sec (1217 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020