mrjimmys notes and tips for Blender

[mrjimmy]

Some time ago I started taking notes in a word document on blender 3D, sort of general stuff I've picked up, not so obvious stuff which is useful which I've been noting down to remind me of these cool shortcuts and techniques I can use to speed up my workflow and stuff. Earlier today I decided to compile most of it together into a word document to hopefully enlighten some beginners and even intermediate users of stuff I wish I had known sooner.

EDIT: After a handy suggestion from mzungu I've decided to copy and paste the notes here.


mrjimmys notes and tips, plus other resources
(The tutorial links are not mine of course, they are just really worth checking out)

Introduction
These are some of the notes I started making when using blender some time back, the stuff here is pretty general but mostly not initially obvious stuff. I’ve found that notes have really helped me remember key points about my general workflow in Blender and the general use of it. Making notes is also very useful when going through say, the open workshop blender DVDs to remind you of the key and noteworthy points of the resources you just went over. Just remember not to overload yourself too much with notes, sometimes you will want to be going back over the tutorials for the in depth look at things.

Also I’m sure some of you are thinking ‘of course I make notes’ (or have good memories for this sorta thing), but I reckon there are some culprits out there who are forgetting what they learnt and going back to not using these handy quick tips they’ve picked up?

General (including items which may fall into more than one category)
- Don’t forget the usefulness of using manipulators other than the standard move manipulator, like the scale manipulator for easier scaling along a certain axis. Or the rotation manipulator for easier posing of armatures
- You can use ‘L’ as a short cut to select the selected parts of a mesh or UV unwrap. When using L to select the connected parts of a mesh make note of where your cursor is, if something is not being selected as you want it to then move your cursor to the initial vertice you have selected and trying again
- If you are in face select mode and you are using the loop select tool (Alt + RMB) you can select the loop you want easily by having your cursor at the edge of the face for the loop you want to select (like the left or right edge of a UV sphere to have a selection going around it), which I guess is pretty much how you are supposed to go about it
- To load scripts manually go the text window, click on text, open your python file and press alt + P to run the script. You might sue this for a script you want to quickly use but don’t want to install for instance
- If you look in the scripts panel (in the scripts window) you can find some very cool stuff, like the landscape generator. This is also generally where installed third party renderers (such as Indigo) are located after you install them so you can start rendering with them
- Painting objects onto a scene; http://www.cgcookie.com/articles/pai...-blender-scene - An effective and fun way to make your scenes look more organic.

It’s a powerful tool, similar to painting in plants/trees in the Cryengine 2 editor (if you’re a Crysis fan like me). You can also convert the painted objects into real objects (Crtl + C) so that you don’t actually lose your changes when you click on the ‘free edit’ button. You can paint anything, like plants, birds etc.
- I’m sure you know that you can hold down Ctrl and Shift to move in exact or tiny increments, but you can also use Crtl + Shift to have a sort of combination of two (small, exact increments)
- Hold Shift while clicking the edit mode manipulators to select more than one manipulator mode at a time (such as edge and face select). To change editing modes on the fly, press Ctrl + TAB (one I often use myself)
- It’s useful to name textures, armatures and objects as you’re going along to avoid confusion later
- You can scale on a local axis by pressing the scale button and then pressing the axis button (x, y or z) twice

General shortcuts
- Shift + Space - makes a window full screen, and back to normal. This can be good for animating for example when you want a clearer visualization of an animation whilst it’s playing
- Alt + Space - brings up the orientation panel in the 3D view
- Shift + G – the select similar options, useful for say, selecting all the seams in a mesh, or all the faces of a mesh that use the same material etc. There are different options depending on which selection mode (as in face, vertex, edge) you are in
- ` - (the button to the left of 1) show all layers, shift + the button again to hide all the layers except for the initially selected layer(s)
- Crtl + T – convert selected faces to triangles, sometimes necessary for exporting meshes to game engines, but I think that some of them do this automatically anyways
- Alternatively Crtl + J converts faces to quads
- . R or . RR – rotate a selected camera (or an object) around the 3D cursor
- Ctrl + 1 quickly adds a subsurf modifier into your stacker without having to go through the menus. To use higher subsurf levels, use Ctrl + 2, 3 or 4
- CRTL+ ALT + Scroll - rotate around left/right (turntable rotation)
- C - center the view to the cursor
- M – mirror a selection (note that you will have to select an axis with X, Y or Z (or a combination of two axis with Shift plus the axis you want to exclude)

Modeling
- You can use the retopo tool to cut a hole in a curved surface by creating a circle with the right number of verts (for topology) and moving it to the surface in the retopo mode, then you can join the circle to the mesh etc. In retopo mode the circle will shape to the curve. You may want to do some further editing to get it placed more accurately
- Blenders retopo tools are a fast, powerful and effective way to create a low poly mesh from a high poly mesh (this is actually a note I picked up from Johnathan Williamson, cheers). Watch the video for more on this http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/3d-...ad-in-blender/
- Okay so let’s say that you want to zoom right into a spot to move some vertices to an exact location for one reason or another, to easily zoom into the spot press Shift+B and select the spot you want to zoom in on in the 3D view, voila, but now you don’t want to scroll all the way back out again each time so instead press the ‘Home’ key to zoom back out fully instantly
- http://blendernewbies.blogspot.com/2...re-for-3d.html
The first in a set of videos on hand modeling, I wish I had seen this one sooner!
- Sometimes it’s necessary or easier to have an object made up as many sets of unlinked mesh parts to create the shape, and for the most part it’s okay to do this so don’t be afraid to give the illusion of one object with many mesh parts
- When scaling, rotating or moving, shift + an axis, cancels the transformation along that axis. Very useful is you want to scale something like a cylinder to have a bigger diameter but the same length along it. Alternatively you can also press ‘S’ and then the Axis you want to scale (but this is mainly for a scaling on a single axis as far as shortcuts go)
- Directing edge flow can be made easier with CRTL + E, rotate edge on certain faces
- When placing loopcuts you can place them instantly in the middle of the loop by pressing the middle mouse button (hopefully you have one )
- Triangles negatively affect edge flow, they are really only acceptable in some cases with organic modeling (such as when you don’t have the time to correct it)
- You can use H to hide selected vertices, Shift+H to hide all but the selected vertices and Alt+H to show previously hidden vertices
-Another way to hide vertices is to press Alt+B in which you can select what part of the mesh you want in view, this way is a little different from hiding vertices as only parts of a face can be shown too and in some cases it's easier and quicker to do
- Something I picked up in the Creature Factory DVD, is the combination of the use of the snapping (the magnet icon in the header) and automerge editing (found in the mesh panel) tools to move vertices to the location of other vertices whilst holding Crtl when moving them (make sure you cursor is next to the vertice being moved) to get rid of unwanted verts. An example of using this may include the corner of an air vent (which is essentially a 3 sided bend) where extruded vertices would take up the same location on the inner side
- Try looking at proportions in ways where you can use reference measurements of one part of something with another, like a middle finger of a human hand generally being the same length as the palm of a hand
- You can copy and edit parts of a mesh to save time on other parts of the object, like in the case of modeling a finger and then copying it as the other fingers (with some tweaking and scaling afterwards). Something that’s shown in most hand modeling videos and tutorials




These notes continue 2 posts down

[mzungu]

Great idea, and I'm glad you shared it... but you gotta find a better way to share it. Why not save it out of word (at the very least) as an HTML file and post it to a web host (there are many good free ones available if you don't already have one [visit freehostia.com as a good example] - or even thru your ISP). This .doc format on a free file host (with a bunch of pop-ups and junk) is not the way to go.

...heck, even just copy/paste it into your message body here! Thats better than this way...

...not to bum you out or discourage! Again, great idea and I'd really love to read thru what you've got, but I'll wait 'til its properly presented.

[mrjimmy]

Oh snap, of course :P Cheers man, will try the copy and paste thing first.



EDIT: Here's the rest of it.

UV related notes
- Creating UV maps by projecting from the view does not mess up the normals of an image, for example you can project the top and underside faces of a mesh in once instance and it would still project an image from the faces normals. Just like, in case you were wondering, I mean I’m sure you knew that anyways, I know I did…heh…
- Try hiding faces you’ve unwrapped as you go along so as not to select the wrong faces (which can be a right nightmare)
- Another unwrapping tip; say you have a lot of mesh objects to be unwrapped which are all the same shape (like ladder steps for example), it’s easier, quicker and more accurate to just do the unwrapping for one of these steps and then copy and place the duplicated step in the places where the to be unwrapped mesh objects were (‘were’ as in once you’ve deleted them but used their location as a reference point, that is if you doing this technique whilst modeling which would have been easier, silly me).

I’ve heard there’s a script for this too though which makes the process even easier so the above is really just the way I go about it (I’ve never found this script myself)
- When UV unwrapping remember that sometimes you may have to unwrap only a few of the faces from a mesh at a time to prevent unusual unwraps as everything tries to fit itself into the small square UV space
- You can pin central/key vertices in a UV unwrap and then unwrap the object again to get a better unwrap in some cases (this is tricky to explain here, play around with this to get a better idea of what I mean)
- Do you have unwrapped faces in the UV window with wonky edges? Like with an unwrapped cylindrical shape? Well you can fix this quickly by selecting the edge (Alt+ RMB does the job quickly often times) and scaling them along a horizontal or vertical axis (depending on whether the set of faces is on a horizontal or vertical orientation) and then pressing 0, for both sets of edges (but do it one at a time to the edges of course ).

You do want to be careful about doing this though. Whilst sometimes these edges will actually just be wonky because you’ve unwrapped the faces along with another set of faces and they are trying to fit into the UV space however blender sees fit, other times these edges will be like that because the angle or scale of the faces is different from the other connected faces in the mesh. And using the technique I mentioned will cause unwanted stretching in these cases. Other times though the angles or sizes of the connected faces will be so minimal that you can get away with using that technique to have a nicer fit of all your UV unwraps in the UV space before you export it all to your preferred 2D app
- So you have yourself a nicely unwrapped object but when you go into textured view there’s faces with the wrong (or no) texture applied to the face, to fix this simply go the unwrapped set of faces in the UV window (making sure the problem face is present) and select the texture you want shown in textured view again for all the faces. Other times the face will not even be there in which case the normals may need to be flipped

Texturing
There’s not much in this section because a lot involved in the texturing process is to do with 2D apps like GIMP and notes that can be applied to any package (although I’ve gone on about anyways about some of those parts of the texturing process, things to think about).

- Hardness maps can be used to make skin look oily in places (a black image with the oily areas in white)
- So we have bump maps and normal maps, what’s the main difference? Normal maps are more accurate (when done right), although bump maps are created quickly and are often used with a stronger effect
- [COLOR=black]Think about where two edges or objects meet when texturing (this refers to wear)[/COLOR]
- There are techniques you can use to have seamless looking textures, I couldn’t tell you a lot about how to do them exactly (or at least not without talking gibberish), but one involves using projection painting and moving UV islands over different parts of the texture in the UV window and then painting where the seams are (as shown in the Venoms Lab DVD) and another technique involves baking textures and doing the seamless UV painting in a 2D app (as explained in the Mastering Blender book). Both techniques are better than each in certain cases
- Take into account when texturing: weathering, aging, wearing paint, erosion, rust, wear, dirt/grime, cracks, graffiti, stains, dents, areas with more/less contact with humans and anything else that you can think of that applies. And think of where/when not to overdo it
-'Perfection can detract from realism/believability' and should probably only be used in product showcases
- Don’t forget to add wear to certain decals too (such as stickers or spray paint stencils)

Animation
I haven’t included notes here because I’m only really just getting into it myself. I do have a good suggestion though which will probably be pretty well known to alot of people getting into animation which is to get ‘The Animators Survival Kit’ by Richard Williams. This book, is awesome Also don’t forget of course the Open workshop character animation DVD which is too an excellent resource and worth every penny. You can make some very useful notes from these.

Rendering
- Radiosity tutorial in blender 2.49b http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_M4ffj2w_WY (it also gives you a good idea of the effect)
- If you want to have a sort of showcase render as some of the more experienced guys do where an object casts shadows onto an invisible surface then add a plane where you want a shadow cast and enable ‘OnlyShad’ and ‘ztransp’ in the planes material settings
- J – show previous render (when in the render window), J again to go back.

[starplayer]

Good tips. Learned a bit from it

[mrjimmy]

Then it was worth it

[makr]

Originally Posted by mrjimmy Then it was worth it

Definitely!
We keep forgetting so many of these small things - shortcuts, time-saving tricks, what-have-you's.
Thanks

[mrjimmy]

I might add some new entries sometime, I'm always filling up space in my various word documents, I even have one in which I note down the things I did right and the things I didn't do right and other notes I learned from projects (one I picked up from one of my 3D magazines when they interview people)