10 Time-Saving Tricks in Blender

1. Intro: Hello and welcome. My name is Suzana. I'm a 3D artist and your guide through beautiful world of 3D design and animation in Blender. In this class, I will show you ten quick tricks I wish someone shared with me when I started using Blender. That will help you speed up modelling and animation in Blender. And that way turn some complex tasks into very easy to do, saving both time and effort. You will learn how to quickly make stairs using the bevel. How to make camera and light follow some object. How to use on un-subdivide to create interesting shapes. How to use the append, how to use sky texture, how to quickly set camera, how to make quick selections, how to clean up material slots on one object or entire project, and how to reset cursor. After going through this class, you will gain more confidence and use blender more effectively. That will help you further when you work on complex projects as it will save you a lot of time. Let's begin. 2. Quick Stairs Using Bevel: One quick trick that will help you create stairs without much effort. When you have a cube like this, simply go to Edit mode. Left-click here, and switch here to edge select. Now, select this top edge over here. Just left-click on that, and then right-click. And here you will see on this menu phase bevel edges. You can also use Control V for this. Or it's just simply left-click here. And you will get this string. You see, if I pull it to the right side, it starts making this bevel. So I will pull this all the way. I just jog this. I'm not doing anything except moving mouse to the right to make this a vowel. And once I'm okay with this, I left-click. Here we will appear this new menu, which saves the vowel. If you left-click this arrow over here, it will pop out. And here you will see a lot of things. But what's important here is segments. And now we have one segment. But if I left-click here, and let's say I entered some other number, let's say 20. And I left-click on the side so it applies. You see what happens. It's cut. Here, are making 2020 segments. Now. Here in profile type, switch to cost them. Left click that, and it will change right away. And if you go here to preset left click this arrow. You will find here steps, left click that, and that. We have stamps ready? If I press male mouse, I can rotate the scene around. And you see our steps are nice and ready. If you want, you can now change number of steps. Let's say you left-click here and enter ten LLF clique. So it applies. And then again go here to preset and two steps, and this is how it appears now. This can be also handy if you don't want really steps, but you want something that looks like steps spots with a little different shape. So if you go here and you will see here, each of these steps has marked this, this points on the side. So if you left-click this one, see that, and pull it. Let's say this way. Just left-click on that and drag it. Holding left-click and let go. You see what happens. You literally change shape here. If I left-click again and you pull it back. Iterators. So you can use this to make some shapes on yours, theirs, just by dragging these points around. So this can be handy when you want to make something quickly. And it appears like stairs. And you just then job these elements around and you get some new shapes. Like this. Easy way to make stairs or stare like shapes using the vowel and changing segments. As you can see, it's quick and simple. Just enter number, left-click, so it applies. Go back to preset left-click steps and you have another shape over here. 3. Camera Follows Object: How to make camera follow object you created on your scene. That's very simple. You need to select camera. I will point here and zoom out using mouse wheel. I'm just scrolling mouse wheel to zoom out. So switching here, just select the box and see camera is selected. Now, if you go here to Object Constraint properties, and a left-click here, odd object constraint. And you select chalk to, you, left-click on that. You will get this here. It says chalk to target is what you want your camera to follow. So for left-click this eyedropper and points whether here on q are here. These are actually stairs. We changed our cube inches stairs. Viewpoint here, and left-click. Now here cube is selected. And see what happens. I will switch now to Move tool. And I will left click here to select cube instead of camera. Now watch this. If I left-click here this red arrow, and I start jogging these stairs. Over x axis you see camera follows the stairs. Now, if I left-click here, and I will now use this to jog. To show you. You see this inside this camera view. What camera can see now, and you'll see how nicely camera follows our object. Here, I'm switching back to Scene view. You see camera is moving. Camera is moving and keeps following this object to keep it centered. So if you toggle the camera view, you can see nicely what's going on. And this is what would be rendered later is see how it flies nicely and follows that object is object moves around. So I draw that object over the x-axis or y-axis. In camera keeps following. It's always focused on that object. So this is very handy. When you want to animate and to move objects around. You don't need to do much. Gamer keeps following. Who can even move it up. Camera goes up and follows or down. And saves your time during the animation. Because camera is already animated in a way and follows your object around, gives nice smooth movement. And object is always in focus. 4. Light Follows Object: If you want to keep your light, this is your light. If you want to keep your light, always following your object. So it's always nicely lit. You can do the similar thing you do with, you already did with the camera. So you just need to go here to objects constraint properties. Add objects constraint, truck to. Again the same thing. Select eyedropper, left-click eyedropper, and point here, a left-click to select this object. And we will now switch here, selecting Queue. And using Move tool. I move this. And you'll see this shows where the light falls. This line. I will now left with this hand to move scene down. So you can see this blue line shows where the light falls. So if I move this object, you see light keeps following this object. So it's always delete and always followed by light. 5. Cursor Resetting: Ceo decided to add one object, but you don't want that new objects to appear here where cursor is. So you want to move your cursor away, let's say here. And you add left-click, go to Mesh, and let's say add another cube. Now you want to return this cursor over here. So how to do that? That's easy. What you need to press Shift and C. And you see cursor is back to center again. So this is handy. I don't need to chase where your center of the scene is. Simply press Shift C, As you can see if I click here now cursor is over here and I press Shift C, and it's back. Very handy. And it will save you time. You can always bring back your cursor. You just reset cursor back to center. So they need to add another object. So let's say here, you add cursor over here, left-click mesh. Let's say I ecosphere and I want my cursor to go back to center I needed here. So I just press Shift C and it's back here again. Very simple. 6. Appending Materials: I will show you now how you can use something from your previous project on your new project. So for an example, how to use Blender file. You have saved on your computer and odd materials from that file to your new project. Without creating those materials all over again. What do you need to do is to go here to file a left click that. And you will see here where it says append. So if I left-click dat and you go to your computer where your Blender files are. Now that depends where you are saving your files and you go to that folder and you select some of Blender file you saved earlier. I will select this one on my computer. And then you left-click here, append. And you will get to see all those folders within that project, within that file. And I want to use materials again. So I will, I double-click this to open. And I was just the left-click and wrap this around all these materials. And I will now left-click here, a band. And I go here now two material properties. And if I left-click here, you see I have here materials from my previous project. Each show 0 in front y, because those are not assigned yet to any object. So they have 0. So now if I left-click here, just to switch here to select box, if I liked it, left-click these stairs over here, and I left-click here. I can now select this material and apply it to these stairs. I will switch, switch here to render view. So you can see I apply this material, this will be barely visible over here if I switch to a material preview mode. So you see I use material from my previous blender file to apply on this new blender file I have working on now. So if I left-click this cube, I can now add this material over here. You see a transparent cube. Those that are materials from my previous project. And I just used append and selected those materials. They appeared here. So this is handy thing. You can simply quickly recreate some materials you're like you used in your previous projects. And use again on your, on your project without much effort, without creating everything. So you have something you like, you save that later. Just use a band and you can add that one more time over here. So let's now select this icon sphere and left-click here, and let's assign this material as well. So see, I have again just parent material here, very nice. And I didn't need to create again, it was created in my previous project, and I just use the band here to reuse again for this project as well. Very handy thing. You can that way up and some other things on coffee only materials, but some other things from your from that blend file. I just wanted to show you how handy it is to reuse already created materials and to keep reusing that, those from one project to another. So can now append more like Hugo here again. And you go to a band. I will now go back one spot and one more. And I will now scroll down here to some other project I worked on. Let's say this one over here. And I, again, left-click append, and I double-click here to open materials. You see I have here a lot of materials. Let's say I select some, I won't select all. Let's say I select only these and I left-click append. Now see, I have all these materials here because 0 in front because it's not assigned to anything. So now if I, let's say I left Gleick this stairs over here, and I want them this color or this color. I can easily add those materials. Again, very handy thing and time-saver. 7. Cleaning Up Material Slots: Let's say you were creating something and you wanted to add more than one mu2 yield to that object. And you kept on adding here more slots. And you went on creating new materials and more new materials and more. And then you change your mind and you decided you want this object to have only one material. And then you have so many unused materials for that object and you want to clean that up. How do you do that? Simply, you left click this arrow over here, and it says remove unused slots. So just left-click to select that. And here it is. All gone. You cleaned up and it's not anymore kilometers over here. You have just the one material that is used that will remove all unused materials for that object. It's really handy and helps a lot. If you have here many unused materials and you want to get rid of this, well, that's done differently. Then. You need to go here to object and here to clean up and remove unused material slots. Now, if you go here you will see it doesn't happen. But if you restart blender, everything will vanished here. Vanish here. That is not attached, is not assigned to any objects. So you need to a restart blender for this to work. So let's just go to Object, cleanup, remove unused material slots, and then restart blender, and all those will vanish. That's how it works in case you want to get rid of these which have 0 in front. 8. Un-subdividing : How to create some cool shapes. Using an sub-divide. Says Select your object. In this case, we will select you. And we'll left-click here this arrow, and it will have to click to go to Edit Mode. Now, right-click and select sub-divide. Here a number of cuts, increase that number. Let's say we will go for eight here. We subdivided this cube to many, many, many small areas. And now what I want to do is I want to select everything. And I will right-click now. And you'll see here on this menu, it says on sub-divide, now are left with that and you see what happens? I'm already getting interesting. Shape here says iterations. Now, if I increase that, I'll let just left click this arrow over here. You see how this keeps changing. And you'll get really, really interesting shapes this way from your cube just by using sub-divide option. This can be handy when you're creating like let's say some sky and phi environments and things like that. And you were, when you were working on more complex shape than a cube. It can you really, really nice shapes further. And you can later just go, let's say select certain faces are around and just extrude those further, like pressing E on your keyboard and extruding this way or that way or E and S together. And it helps get really, really interesting and strange shapes just by subdividing and on subdividing further. 9. Quick Selections: Let's learn how to easily select or deselect more or less faces on some object. So let's say we go here to Edit Mode. I left-click here, edit mode. And I right-click and I go to sub-divide. I select that. And here I increase number of cuts. I will enter number ten. I left-click so it applies. You have now ten cuts. So if I go here to select, I can Checker Deselect. You see what happens. I can deselect some and let's say I press E on my keyboard and S. And I move this inside or outside. You see I can change shape of this cube and create something else. Just by using that. Let's stop here. I just moved mouse. I press E and S together, holding that. They just moved mouse left or right to get this shape I extruded. So I went to the right to push it in. I would go inside sales team. One simple selection changed object a lot. So you can go here to select, and you can here select random. And if a point here and a left-click, he can hold him because left-click drag this around in change, how it's selected. You can hear and to random seed as well. Are you can hear switch between select and deselect. So that's quick and easy way to make selections. When you want to not go around and click, click, click, click, click, holding Shift to select all those faces. You can just use this select random Checker Deselect to quickly make selections, adjusting here using seed or ratio and creating some shape. 10. Sky Texture: If you need a quick sky for your scene and you don't have any of you available HCR, I too had to change that environment. You can simply. Go here to work properties before that swap here to cycles from Eve. Because some of these want work you need and. Once you change, the cycles cohere to. Invert properties and here. Left click this yellow dot. And once you're here. Under texture. Select sky texture. And what you see here, it will change right away and it will show you when you sit down to see what's happening all around, you need to swap here. To render it. View. And you see. You have already some interesting skiing environment. Now, depending on what you do here on these sliders, this environment will change a lot, as you can see now. It's a little foggy and very, very pale. But if you point here and increase this slow. You see, we started to get some warmth and if you point here and electric and increase this slow. You add some does or reduce here you add ozone. So her last weak point. You can add some ozone to your scene and that's how you create. Sky texture environment very quickly. You don't need hdr i you have already you see sun is falling shining on your object around and you're getting interesting environment. Sun is on this side, as you can see. And shining. Your object. So you have nice, cool environment. Where you can already create something, some nice scene. And for an example here, you can set some scene where sun is shining like the water and. Something that gets affected that by that light. Our city line. So Cityscape and things like that. Very quick way to create a nice environment you can swap here. There are more. It's not just Nikita. You can elect click this arrow. And try this one. If you are born here and jog this slow, you can see changes a lot. Depending on numbers, you, A.C., you get more warmer or more cold bluish. Now, this one is as well, nice. It's called PRISM. And. If you go down here, reduce this. So. Something like a dot. You get nice bluish salt and warmth around. You can just use this arrows to adjust. This to number your wish. And here is strength. You can use that on all where you adjust how much this affects entire scene. You make it darker. You make it more light. If you need to have an evening scene, you would go down. If you need a scene, you would go up. With those numbers and you can create quickly. Your. Sky round without much effort. Very candid thing. In case you don't like using HDR AI or you don't have any available you can use. Pretty. Or Nikita. These two are very, very nice and quickly help to create nice environment. Keep in mind that Nikita doesn't work. Nikita works only in cycles. That's why I stopped two cycles here. But freedom works in both cycles and here. And. He fell. 11. Quick Camera Setting: How to quickly adjust the camera. You just move your scene around and select, zoom out, zoom in, set the position you want, and angle at that era. And then once you're okay with that, just press Control Alt and hit 0 on numeric pad. And that will set camera, right where you want. Maybe not exactly, but near to what you want to see. Then you just go here to object properties. Make sure that you selected camera over here. And I'm pointing here to location. You can move camera a left to right until you'll get exact you want it. You can hear, adjust the rotation of camera and make sure that camera is straight forward if you wanted to straighten it, of course. And and Google view, you can point down or up, move it to left, right, rotating around that axis. So this is for rotation around that axis. This is for location on x axis, y axis, or that axis. And this is for scaling camera. I don't recommend you do that. There is no need. You can always move camera back-and-forth. Here. You can change the focal length of camera, right now is 50 millimeters. You can change that. Can get also very nice and interesting view with focal length 30. For an example, as you can see, it appears that it's stepped away, which just changed focal length here. So these are quick settings for a camera. And if you don't see something like when your object is very far and you don't see it and you want it visible. That means your object is behind 100 meters. So can increase here view. An odd, let's say 400 or 500 or whatever. And camera view increases. Camera can see more far. It's by default set to 100 meters. But here is where you increase that view and allow camera to see objects far away as well. 12. Closing Words: I hope you liked this class and I hope to see you again. It's a privilege to be here and share knowledge with you. Practice, explore, and post your projects. Don't forget to leave a review for those that might want to check out this class as well and learn more. Until next time. Bye.