Useful features

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

I went on for years before finding out that you can press zero again on keypad to return from camera view to previous view you had. Yes, can read manual or check out keyboard commands or whatever, but who does that anyway…

I was thinking it could be nice to have a list of those kind of tricks outside basic operations that maybe are not obvious to everyone. Like ctrl+select (another one I didn’t know).

2

Let me rephrase that for you:

Such a document is commonly known as a manual.

3

People who actually want to learn how to use the program, that’s who.

4

abc123, we miss you

5

Here are a few.

  • Checker Deselect in Edit Mode (Select -> Checker Deselect) can be used to select every ‘nth’ face.
  • Numbers and in some cases letters can be used to select menus. W+4 removes doubles. W+D Shades Smooth.
  • Video I made on various uses for the 3D Cursor.
  • Most numerical entry boxes you can use Math. Typing pi will give you 3.14 for example.
  • There is a lock camera to view option in the n-panel, which makes camera positioning a lot easier.
  • In Weight Paint mode you can Shift+Click over an area and a pop-up Window will list all the vertex groups associated with that spot.
  • If you have LMB for select, Ctrl+LMB will select bones in weight paint.
  • In Texture Paint mode you can use the Grease Pencil to create color swatches and color pick. Screenshot.
6

Yeah, if there’s anybody here that can lay down some insightful wisdom, it’s him. :no:

Basically, you can make a list of favorites you find to be useful, but you can’t list ALL features without turning your list into a manual.

7

Blender could use a manual. What’s the issue?

8

This is the issue:

9

It’s just a thread about Blender tricks. Here is one on CGTalk.

No wonder the majority of threads on this board are nothing but bellyaching about stupid shit all the time.

10

It’s just frustrating when someone demonstrates their unwillingness to seek out any information for themselves and then asks to be spoonfed information.

11

UV!!! Delate damn UV. you can’t do that you can only delate whole uv but not like what you have been selected that is the most stupid think in blender.

12

He made the thread in order to seek out information.

He was rather obviously being tongue in cheek. He’s been registered here since 2006, and went a long time before discovering some fairly basic functionality – most of us do. He threw in an offhand comment about not reading the manual as a joke about his gaps in knowledge. The point of the thread was for people to share things in hopes of patching up these knowledge gaps.

Anyway, ya’ll win. The thread is derailed and useless, as usual. Congratulations. Let’s go bitch about the UI.

13

I’m also a professional animator and specialized to 3D modeling. Yes, it’s true!

Maybe I should try to find out those features myself and share that information.

14

Though there is the manual (wiki) and there are plenty of threads here to google, that doesn’t take away from the fact that the program offering has changed enough that there are plenty of things that are new all the time. We still have people trying to document 2.66 and here we are with 2.67b and 2.68 coming along.

Fun fact - if you hook an image in the compositor to the viewer, and then set a uv image editor to display viewer, once you have added additional nodes to convert your image to desired effect, simply hover over that image editor and press F3 to save the image out to the same size the image input is, regardless of the scene render dimensions.

15

I’m trying to find out more about mirroring to help other people survive with it. What I can’t figure out is how to keep the original selected polygons in edit more mirroring (duplicate them like mirror modifier does). Is this a feature or is there a simple trick in that?

16

Probably to late for smt constructive here, but… let’s try hum !

  • shit + space to full screen
  • e/f after edge loop validation (see tool tip for explanation)
  • ‘a’ to accumulate snap target (very usefull)
  • simple script in text editor to work faster (a single ‘for in’ can save you lot of boring work)
  • Inset (‘i’) with Depth only = extrude + alt S without problem on angle
  • Most of the time, using “single property” on driver will succes where transform channel fail (refresh problem)
  • Drivers can be written directly in text block. Can be time saver for simple one like “frame” or mathematical fuction.
  • Ctrl + Alt + 0 set your camera to your pers point of view (or just close your windows on my distro :p)
  • it never ends ><
17

Do you mean mirroring a mesh without using a mirror modifier?

You can do that by duplicating the half of the mesh you want to keep, press esc to not move it and then while still having it selected, pressing Ctrl+M and then X/Y/Z depending on what axis you want to mirror it to. Unfortunately this will also invert the normals but without deselecting anything you can just press Shift+Ctrl+N to invert the normals so that they are correct again :slight_smile:

Then you can activate “X mirror” under the Mesh Options if you bring up the “T” panel.

A really cool little trick that I wish I knew about much earlier is pressing “A” when you are moving an object/vertex/face/edge and snapping is enabled you can “lock” a snapping point at a vertex for your object/vertex/face/edge to snap to. You can do this on multiple vertices to create a median point to snap to, for example to the exact middle of an edge or a face.

18

I’m interested why the default mirror operation is actually move+mirror? It would make more sense if you want to flip the object you could do it in object mode, but in edit mode it could be more useful to mirror selected polygons.

19

That still confuses me a lot too, even more so that it actually flips the normals, I mean what’s up with that? I pretty much exclusively use the mirror modifier because it is faster to set up and I don’t see a single advantage of using the mirror operation over the modifier.