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Blender is a beast. It is one of the most impressive feats of FOSS ever created.

Contents

Resources

Technical And Architectural Modeling

  • I’m pretty impressed with this Construction Lines add-on — here’s the author’s site. This focuses on construction lines but also seems to cover things obvious to CAD people like rational copying and moving with base points. Not free but it is worth $7 just to use to illustrate what CAD users find frustrating about Blender.

  • Clockmender’s CAD functions also show a frustration with normal Blender. Here is Precision Drawing Tools from the same source. Looks like TinyCAD is joining this project.

  • tinyCAD Mesh Tool Add-on - other people are frustrated by Blender not living up to its potential. Has some simple useful geometry helpers. Couldn’t find this in stock add-ons — suspect it’s for 2.8+. Still interesting.

  • Mechanical Blender is trying to bring sensible technical features to Blender. Looks early (or dead) but worth watching.

  • A nice site showing the potential of architecture in Blender.

  • This is the best video I’ve seen demonstrating good techniques and practices for dimensionally accurate technical modeling.

  • Measureit is an amazingly powerful add-on that allows full blueprint style dimensioning. This video, a continuation of the technical modeling video just mentioned, is the best comprehensive demonstration of it (in 2.8+).

  • Another superb demonstration of technical modeling in Blender is this video showing how to model a hard surface item directly from accurate measurements.

Instruction

The only problematic thing about Blender is that, like many of the best tools for professionals, it is horrendously difficult to learn. Fortunately there are some good resources to help.

Screencast-keys is a non-standard addon, found here, that will highlight what keys are pressed so that observers can follow along. I think it could be helpful for knowing what key you accidentally might have pressed. Note I haven’t tried this.

Making Illustrative Animated Gifs

Making tutorials or trying to post on BlenderSE? Want fancy illustrative gifs? Look for "Animated GIFs From Screen Capture" in my video notes.

Models

Why start modeling from scratch when you can use someone else’s model that they want you to use? I don’t yet know which of these sources suck and which ones are good, but I’m listing them here for completeness. I got the following list from here.

Textures

Installation

It used to suffice to just sudo apt install blender and a Debian system was happily ready to use Blender. But today, it really is not sensible to use a pre-2.8 version and unfortunately Debian will probably be mired in that for a long while. So you probably will need to go to https://blender.org/download and download their package. Click the "Download Blender 2.83.2" button or whatever version is current. You can then find the real and proper link down at the message: "Your download should begin automatically. If it doesn’t, click here to retry." It’s helpful to know that if you’re trying to install it remotely.

This might be helpful too for cutting through fluff:

wget https://mirror.clarkson.edu/blender/release/Blender2.83/blender-2.83.2-linux64.tar.xz
sudo mv blender-2.83.2-linux64.tar.xz /usr/local/src/
cd /usr/local/src/
sudo tar -xvJf blender-2.83.2-linux64.tar.xz
cd ../bin
sudo ln -s ../src/blender-2.83.2-linux64/blender

Now when you type blender, a proper modern version should start up. Make sure /usr/local/bin is in your $PATH.

Set Up And Configuration

Here are some things I like to change in a default start file.

  • Get rid of the cube. Or not. It’s kind of idiomatic tradition at this point. Just learn to press "ax<enter>". But getting rid of it is an option. It does actually serve a purpose to alert you to the fact that you have a brand new untouched project.

  • Put the default camera and light in a collection called "Studio" and turn off its visibility. This makes it easier to delete it if you really don’t needed but also easy to see the default view if that’s helpful.

  • Nerf F1 with a key reassignment to prevent opening browsers intended for help documentation. Uncheck Preferences → Input → Keymap → Key Binding → type "F1" → Window → View Online Manual.

  • n shelf open. If you’re going to hide one, the t shelf is near useless.

  • Rotation point around 3d-cursor (".6").

  • Vertex snapping, not increment.

  • Viewport overlays → Guides → Statistics. On. (Or right click version in lower right.)

  • Start with plan view. Most of my projects start off with some sensible orthographic geometry. Another good reason is that while it is not the iconic Blender default cube typical start view, it is easier to reproduce. So "`8".

  • Output properties → Dimensions → Frame End. 240 (250 at 24fps is just stupid.)

  • Output properties → Output → Color. RGBA.

  • Output Properties → Output = /tmp/R/f (R for render.) This will create (including parents) /tmp/R/f0001.png, etc.

  • System → Memory&Limits → Undo Steps. Change from 32 to 128.

  • System → Memory&Limits → Console Scrollback Lines. Change from 256 to 1204.

  • Scene Properties → Units → Unit System = Freedom. Actually I’ve been having better luck with mm recently; still not a default.

  • Show Normals size .005 (or .05 with mm). Find this setting by going into Edit Mode (you’ll need that cube!) and then going to the viewport overlays menu that’s next to the "eclipse" looking icon on the top right bar.

  • Change all default generation sizes from 24" to 1". This may not stick and I don’t know how to make it permanent. :-( At least in mm, 24 is about 1"! :-)

  • Clipping values are usually a bit narrow by default. n menu → View Tab → View Section → Clip Start/End. I’m going with 1mm and 1e6mm. Using something less that 1mm seems to cause full time rendering confusion.

  • Perhaps fill out some custom 2d material properties. Even a couple of templates for "Color-FilledStroke" "Color-OnlyStroke" or something like that.

  • Add to quick q menu: Save Copy

  • Add to quick q menu: Preferences

  • Preferences → Animation → F-Curves → Default Interpolation → Linear

  • Preferences → Keymap → Preferences → 3d View → Extra Shading Pie Menu Items

  • Preferences → Input → Keyboard → Default To Advanced Numeric Input (allows stuff like "gx10/3" and useful on-the-fly math).

  • Rebind number keys to not hide collections! Go to Preferences → Keymap → Name and enter "Hide Collection". Uncheck the lot.

  • Preferences → Input → Default to Advanced Numeric Input - the plus side is you can do stuff like "gx100/25.4" and it will do a sensible thing. The bad part of this is that minus is a literal subtraction and no longer a shortcut for "oops, I got unlucky choosing the sign of my numeric operation - please fix that".

Addons I like.

  • 3d View: MeasureIt

  • 3d View: Precision Drawing Tools - perhaps fix the nomenclature file to be better.

       $ grep xed /usr/local/src/blender-2.93.3-linux-x64/2.93/scripts/addons/precision_drawing_tools/pdt_msg_strings.py
       PDT_LAB_DEL = "Relative" # xed - was "Delta"
       PDT_LAB_DIR = "Polar"  # xed - was "Direction"
  • Add Mesh: Extra Ojbects

  • Mesh: mesh_tinyCAD

  • Import AutoCAD DXF

  • Import Images as planes

Other Addons to consider.

  • 3d View: Stored Views

  • Object: Bool Tools

  • Object: Align Tools

  • Add Mesh: Bolt Factory

  • Mesh: 3d Print Tool Box

  • Interface: Modifier Tools

  • Mesh: F2

  • Mesh: Edit Mesh Tools

  • Export AutoCAD DXF

  • External: CAD Transform for Blender Mine is named: lcad_transform_0.93.2.beta.3 A good demo. Note that this addon hides over on the left in the menu activated with "t"; it is labeled as "CAD" with a green cube.

I also had a very elaborate start up procedure for doing video editing setup. See below for that.

I found that I prefer non-noodley noodles in the node editor. Here’s how to make sure that happens.

Edit → Preferences → Themes → Node Editor → Noodle Curving → 0

Disabling Emoji And Unicode Conflicts

Since Blender exhaustively uses every possible key combination, you can’t have obscure ones that you never use lurking around in some miscellaneous interface features. My window manager is pretty good about never needing anything that doesn’t use the OS key, but I recently discovered that [C][S]-e seems to be bound to a new-fangled system feature of "ibus". (This is interesting because Gimp seems to know how to override it when using this combo for "Export".)

It looks like the way to cure this is to run ibus-setup and go to the "Emoji" tab. Click the "…" button; click the "Delete" button; click the "Ok" button.

It might be smart to get rid of the Unicode one too (which is [C][S]-u by default).

Maybe these could be rebound to the OS key if they’re needed some day. I’m not sure that’s even possible but it is what makes sense.

3-D Modeling

X is red, Y is green. Right hand coordinates, Z is up and blue.

Vertices and edges are fine (though weird that you can’t just spawn those without enabling the Extra Objects addon), but faces are kind of weird. There’s something kind of vague about them. They can have 3 edges (tris), 4 (quads), or a whole bunch. So what’s going on? This official Blender design document explains exactly how it all works.

Units

Here in the USA many things are measured in Freedom Units. Blender can play along. Go to the properties tabs and look for the "Scene Properties" tab which will be a little cone and sphere icon. The second item is "Units". Choose "Imperial" and "Inches" and things should be fine.

Importing From CAD

Sometimes I need to get CAD models imported into Blender and that isn’t always easy. One important trick is running the models through FreeCAD. Try exporting to STEP files from the CAD program and having FreeCAD import that and export STL files. Blender can then import those pretty well.

Window Layout

Full official details are here and actually helpful.

The old way to split areas into subdivided areas: drag the upper right corner down (horizontal split) or left (vertical split). To combine areas, make sure they are the same format (e.g. one big pane doesn’t go right into 2 horizontally split panes) and drag the upper right corner up or to the right.

In 2.8+ things seem much easier to arrange. Just go to the edge of the viewport you’re interested in fixing and look for the left-right or up-down arrow icons. Once those are visible, you can use RMB to bring up a menu that will allow you to "Vertical/Horizontal Split" or "Join Areas". Also look at the "View → Area" top button menu for another easy way to split. This allows you to customize easily without the drama of old Blender.

A huge tip for people with multiple monitors is that you can detach windows. In old Blender this is done with the same drag of the upper right corner, just hold down Shift first. Which way you drag doesn’t matter—the window is just cloned with its own window manager decoration.

In 2.8+ there is a similar technique with [S] and dragging the plus to the left or something like that. You can also use the "Window" button on the top row menu to create a "New Window" — you may need to do a lot of shuffling after that though. Another way is to use the "View" button on the top row menu and then "Areas" (which is what these Blender function regions are called) and then "Duplicate Area into New Window". This will usually duplicate the wrong window but at least it only gives you one area to reset the way you want it.

Mouse Buttons

  • LMB

    • Select (in 2.8+). Click multiple times to cycle through any ambiguous selection.

    • [S]-LMB - expand selection explicitly.

    • [C]-LMB - expand selection inclusive or "Pick Shortest Path". E.g. LMB click one vertex and then [C]-LMB a few vertices over and all in between will be selected.

    • [A]-LMB - Select edge rings and face loops. The axis depends on which component is closest to mouse pointer when clicked.

    • [A]-LMB - (OM) Bring up a selection box for ambiguous selection. For example if there is an object inside of another object, holding [A] while LMB clicking in the general direction will bring up a menu of the possible objects.

    • [S][C]-LMB - expand selection inclusive but entire area on 2 axes. In Shader/Node editor (with Node Wrangler) this inserts a "Viewer" node into the graph to preview or diagnose what that step is producing.

  • MMB

    • (Middle Mouse Button) rotate (orbit) view. In draw mode, accepts drawn shapes.

    • [C]-MMB - scale view (zoom/move view camera closer)

    • [S]-MMB - pan view (translate), reposition view in display or, as I like to think of it, "shift" the view

    • [S][C]-MMB - Pan dolly a kind of zoom along your view

    • [A]-MMB - Center on mouse cursor. Drag to change among constrained ortho views.

  • RMB -

    • Vertex/edge/face context menu (EM). Object context menu (OM).

    • [C]-RMB - Select intermediate faces to mouse cursor automatically when certain EM geometry is selected. So for example, you can get A1 on a chessboard, hold [C] and right click on A8 and get the entire A column. Also, if you’re in some kind of edit mode where you’re extruding over and over again, [C]-RMB will extrude to the current mouse position. In Shader Editor with Node Wrangler, this brings out the edge cutting scissors.

    • In Shader Editor with Node Wrangler, this does a quick connect from one node to another to the implicit hook up point.

    • [C][A]-RMB - In draw mode, starts a lasso which will encircle items for deletion. In Shader Edit mode with Node Wrangler this does a semi-automatic hook-up presenting you with a choice dialog of the possible hook-up points; so another step, but finer control.

  • Scrollwheel - A mini 1-axis track ball on your mouse! Brilliant!

    • SWHEEL - Scales time line.

    • [C]-SWHEEL - Pans the time line.

    • [A]-SWHEEL - "Scrubs" through time line, i.e. repositions current frame.

Keyboard Shortcuts

There are 1000s. Here I will try to enumerate the ones I’ve encountered. Also remember that you can go to Preferences and select the "Keymap" section and learn a lot about what the currently configured bindings (and possibilities) are. Probably best to not go too wild with changing those unless you really know what you’re doing. Note that the tooltips often have the keybinding for the operation and an extra interesting hint is that if you turn off tool tips in the Prferences → Interface you can get them at any time by holding Alt and hovering over the feature. F3 searching also shows the keybinding when available.

  • [S]

    • In draw mode, constrains lines and shapes to orthogonal axes or equal dimensions. Does some other mysterious smoothing thing with freehand draw mode; see [A] for constraining freehand drawing.

    • While performing transformations that can use a mouse input (g, r, s, etc), shift will slow down motion.

    • Holding shift will slow down how fast values are changing when modifying a value by moving a slider.

  • [C]

    • Snapping. Hold [C] or use toggle snap property button. In draw mode, holding [C] causes drawing actions to erase per the erase tool’s settings.

  • [A]

    • When drawing in draw mode, constrains to orthogonal axes - a bit janky. Draw mode shapes become centered at the start point, even lines.

    • When making an ambiguous selection in object mode (perhaps others) it will cause a "Select Menu" to appear where you can choose which of the objects you were after. Useful for things like nested objects inside of another.

  • F1 F1

    • "Help" - Good to nerf this with a keyboard reassignment if a normal program’s idea of a normal web browser is not going to work for you (ahem).

    • [S]-F1 - File browser.

  • F2

    • Rename selected (OM). Only last (bright orange) if multiple selected.

    • [S]-F2 - Movie clip editor.

    • [C]-F2 - Batch renaming in the outline (search and replace). (Hmmm… Not working for some reason… Search for "Batch Rename" in F3. Or interestingly it looks like Blender is reading the keysym at a very deep low level; this means that you must use the genuine original Control key instead of a perfectly sensible remapped key. Thankfully this seems the only situation where this is a problem.)

  • F3

    • Open search form/menu.

    • [S]-F3 - Texture node editor. Press again for shader editor. Again for compositor.

  • F4

    • File menu including Preferences.

    • [S]-F4 - Python console.

  • F5-F8

    • In theory these are reserved to be defined by the user.

    • [S]-F5 - 3D viewport.

    • [S]-F6 - Graph editor. Press again for drivers.

    • [S]-F7 - Properties.

    • [S]-F8 - Video sequencer.

  • F9

    • Bring up modification menu for last operation. E.g. adjust bevel segments.

    • [S]-F9 - Outliner.

  • F10

    • [S]-F10 - Image editor. Press again for UV editor.

  • F11

    • View render.

    • [S]-F11 - Text editor.

    • [C]-F11 - View animation.

  • F12

    • Animate single frame.

    • [C]-F12 - Animate all frames of animation sequence. Note that this does not work if you use a remapped CapsLock as your Ctrl. There are a couple of bindings like this where the remapped control is not good enough for some weird reason and this is one of them. Use the native Ctrl key and it will work.

    • [S]-F12 - Dope sheet.

  • PgUp,PgDn = Page Up, Page Down

    • PgUp,PgDn - In NLA editor, moves tracks up or down.

    • [C]-PgUp - Change top view port configuration tab (Layout, Modeling, Sculpting, UV Editing, etc.)

    • [S]-PgUp - In NLA editor, moves tracks to top (or bottom).

  • "."

    • Pivot menu. Like the one next to the snap magnet icon. With something selected in the outliner, "." in the 3d editor will hunt for it in the model. With something selected in the model, "." from the outliner will find it in the outliner.

    • [C]-. - Transform origin, which means fully edit the origin point as if it were an object independently of its object’s geometry. Extremely powerful and useful!

  • ","

    • Orientation.

  • "`"

    • Ortho view pie menu removing the need for a numpad.

  • "~"

    • Pie menu. For what normally? Solves no numpad for views.

    • [S]-~ - Fly. (No idea what this means.)

  • "/" - Zooms nicely onto the selected object to focus attention on it. Press again to return to previous view. In Node Wrangler, inserts a reroute node (basically a bend or bifurcation in an edge).

  • "="

    • [S]-= Organizes nodes when using Node Wrangler.

  • arrows

    • Used with "g" movements, moves a tiny increment (sort of one pixel).

    • <LRarrows> - In animation modes, go to next and previous frame.

    • [S]-<LRarrows> - In animation modes, go to first and last frame.

    • [S]-<UDarrows> - In animation modes, go to next and previous keyframe.

    • [C]-<LRarrows> - Move by word (Text Mode).

  • space

    • Start animation.

    • [S]-space - Menu.

    • [C]-space - Toggles current viewport to fill entire workspace (or go back to normal).

    • [C][S]-space - Start animation in reverse.

    • [C][A]-space - makes current viewport fill entire workspace with no menus.

  • backspace

    • Resets to default value when hovering over a form box field.

    • [C]-backspace - resets the single component of a property to default values (for example just the X coordinate rather than X,Y, and Z).

  • tab

    • Toggle object and edit mode. [C]-tab - full mode menu (pose, sculpt, etc). When splitting viewport windows, tab dynamically changes between vertical and horizontal splits in case you have second thoughts. In draw mode if you’ve just created two points for a line leaving the yellow dots, tab will go back to the edit mode to give you another chance at that endpoint. In dope sheet, locks current layer.

    • [C]-tab - Opens a pie menu for selecting from all of the modes (Edit, Object, Pose, etc.). Very useful for more complex things. Also opens the graph editor from the dope sheet.

  • home

    • Zoom extents.

    • Beginning of text (Text Mode).

    • [C]-home - Set start frame.

  • end

    • [C]-end - Set end frame.

    • End of text (Text Mode).

  • 0

    • [C][A]-NP0 - Position camera to be looking at what your viewport is looking at. Wish I knew how to do this without a NumPad. Ah, how about n menu → View → View Lock → Lock Camera To View.

  • 1

    • Applies to all number keys! In Object Mode the behavior of the number keys is essentially a bug. It’s fine for small projects where nothing is even noticed, but for a large project, you’re likely to demolish your entire project in a way that can’t be restored with "undo". What it does is hide all collections but the nth collection (first for 1, second for 2, etc). This may seem minor and unimportant but if you have dozens of nested collections right away the ordinal order of which number goes with which collection is ambiguous. My experiments show it is first counting only the top level collections. Only after all the top level connections are put into a number will nested collections start being assigned numbers (a breadth first search, not a depth first search). Note also that it is easy to get unintuitive ordering: for example, if you rename your second collection C and your third collection B, 3 will preserve the visibility of B which may not be ideal. Actually, how things are ordered in the Outliner is, to me and others, a complete mystery. What is completely inexcusable for keys so easily mistyped, is that there is no way to undo it. You must manually recreate the visibility layout you had established, perhaps painstakingly, throughout your project. Sometimes [A]-h —  in the outliner only! — can be beneficial, but since this unhides everything, you’ll need to go through and hide the things you really wanted hidden; this may be preferable to unhiding the things you want to see and less likely to overlook a nested thing (you have to decide if you want a subtle small correct nested subcomponent thing missing from your render, or a stupid construction-only reference prop to sneak in). The best way to handle this is to disable these bindings. Search for Preferences → Keymap → Name → "Hide Collection" and uncheck all of those. If that seems like essential functionality would then be missing, just use the much easier to remember and more sensible [C]-h which brings up a menu of collections to hide so you don’t even need to guess what goes with what. And normally it’s more sensible to use [S]-1 to just toggle that first collection’s visibility. After all if you are interested in using the number keys for hiding collections, you can’t possibly have more than 10 anyway!

    • Vertex select mode (Edit Mode).

    • [S]-1 - Adds vertex select mode to any others active. Multiple modes are valid.

  • 2

    • Edge select mode (Edit Mode).

    • [C]-2 - Subdivide stuff in some fancy automatic way. This makes a cubic based sphere when done ([C]-2) with the original default (or any) cube selected.

    • [S]-2 - Adds edge select mode to any others active. Multiple modes are valid.

  • 3

    • Face select mode (Edit Mode). In Object mode something happens, not sure what, but stuff disappears. 2 seems to undo it.

    • [S]-3 - Adds face select mode to any others active. Multiple modes are valid.

  • a

    • Select all. When editing an object or mesh with snapping active (so possibly [C] being held too) pressing a when the orange snap target circle is present will "weight" that snap point; an example of how to use this is to press a when snapped to one edge endpoint, then again over the other endpoint, allowing you to snap to the midpoint.

    • aa - Deselect all.

    • [S]-a. Add object to selection.

    • [C]-a - Apply menu, to apply scale and transforms, etc (OM).

    • [A]-a. Select none. (Similar to "aa" or "a + [C]-i".)

  • b

    • Box select (EM). Box mask (SculptMode).

    • [S]-b - Zoom region, i.e. zoom view to a box.

    • [C]-b - Bevel edge. Bind camera to markers (timeline). When a camera is selected, sets render region border box; related to Output Properties → Dimensions → Render Region. In the time line if you have a marker selected, [C]-b attaches the currently selected camera to the marker so you can switch cameras in the animation.

    • [C][S]-b - Bevel a corner.

    • [C][A]-b - Clear render region.

    • [A]-b - Clipping region, limit view to selected box (i.e. drag a selection box first). Repeat to clear. Good for clearing off some walls on a room so you can work on the interior of the room.

  • c

    • Circle (brush) select (EM). Clay (Sculpt Mode).

    • [S]-c - Center 3d cursor (like [S]-s,1) and view all (home). Crease (SculptMode).

    • [C]-c - Copy. Note that this can often be used to pick colors (and other properties) by hovering over a color patch and then pasting it elsewhere.

    • [A]-c - Toggle cyclic (EM of paths).

  • d

    • Hold down d while drawing with LMB to annotate using the annotation tool. Holding down d with RMB erases.

    • [S]-d - Assign a driver (Driver Editor).

    • [C]-d - Dynamic topology (Sculpt Mode).

    • [S][C]-d - Clear a driver (Driver Editor).

    • [S]-d - Duplicate - deep copy.

    • [A]-d - Duplicate - linked replication.

  • e

    • Extrude. [C]-RMB can extend extrusions once you get started. Continue polyline and curve segments in draw mode. Brings up the tracking pie menu in the Movie Clip Editor’s Tracking mode? Set end frame to current position while in timeline.

    • [S]-e - Edge crease.

    • [S][C]-e - Interpolate sequence in Draw Mode - pretty useful actually since this needs to be done a lot and it’s buried deep in the menus (at the top).

    • [C]-e - Edge menu. Contains very useful things like "bridge edge loops". Graph editor easing mode.

    • [A]-e - Shows extrude menu. If you hover over the gradient of the "ColorRamp" node and press [A]-e, you’ll get an eyedropper which can be used to populate the ramp’s value; can be clicked multiple times for multiple colors.

  • f

    • Fill - Fill. Creates lines between vertices too, e.g. to close a closed path. See j for join. In node editor "f" will automatically connect nodes, as many as selected. In a brush mode such as sculpt, weight, texture, etc., f changes brush size.

    • [C]-f - Face menu. Hmm. Or maybe a find menu???? Weight value, which is one of those things like brush size in weight painting mode.

    • [S]-f - Brush strength. Try WASD for controlling?

    • [A]-f - In Edit Mode for bones, switches the direction of the bone, the tail and tip exchange places.

  • g

    • Grab - Same idea as translate/move. I think of it as "Go (somewhere else)".

    • gg - Pressing gg (twice) edge slides along neighboring geometry.

    • [S]-g - Select similar — normals, area, material, layer (grease pencil) et al. — menu.

    • [C]-g - Vertex groups menu (EM). Create new collection dialog (OM) — though I can’t figure out how to actually do anything with this. In the Shader/Node editor, combines selected nodes into a node group.

    • [A]-g - Reset position of object. Remove bone movements in Pose Mode.

    • [C][A]-g - Shader/Node editor ungroup grouped nodes.

  • h

    • Hide selected. In draw mode, hide active layer. Disable strips in the VSE and NLA editors.

    • [S]-h - Hide everything but selected. In draw mode, hide inactive layers.

    • [C]-h - Hooks menu.

    • [A]-h - Reveal hidden. In draw mode, reveals hidden layers. In VSE and NLA, unhides tracks

  • i

    • Inset (EM) with faces selected. Press i twice for individual face insets. Insert keyframe (OM/Pose). Inflate (Sculpt Mode).

    • [C]-i - Invert selection.

    • [A]-i - Delete keyframe (OM/Pose).

  • j

    • Join (EM). With "fill" between two opposite vertices of a quad, you get the edge between them but the quad face hasn’t changed. Join will break that quad face up. The subdivide function can do the same thing - access at the top of the EM context menus (RMB). Mysteriously change slots in image editor during render preview.

    • [C]-j - (OM) Joins two objects into one. Also joins grease pencil strokes. In the Node Editor, puts nodes in frames.

    • [A]-j - Triangles to quads (inverse of [C]-t).

  • k

    • Knife tool. Hold [C] to snap (e.g. to mid points). Snake hook (SculptMode).

  • l

    • Select all vertices, edges, and faces that are "linked" to the geometry the mouse pointer is hovering over. Or edges the same way. Layer (Sculpt Mode).

    • [C]-l - Select linked geometry, i.e. everything connected. In Object Mode, it brings up the Link/Transfer Data menu; this allows you to send objects from one scene to another, and other similar things.

    • [S]-l - In Pose Mode, add the current pose to the current Pose Library (as some kind of one frame "action" or something).

    • [A]-l - In Pose Mode, browse poses in the current Pose Library.

    • [S][A]-l - In Pose Mode, brings up a menu of poses in the Pose Library so you can delete one, i.e. pretty safe.

    • [S][C]-l - In Pose Mode, rename the current pose. Why not F2? Don’t know.

  • m

    • Move to collection (OM). Move grease pencil points to another layer (EM). Add marker (timeline). Mute a node in node editor to disable its function temporarily.

    • (EM) Merge menu. Collapse vertices into one. Important for creating a single vertex. Can be done "By Distance" which will collapse vertices that are very (you specify) close. Formerly [A]-m (remove doubles/duplicates), now it seems just m in Edit mode brings up the merge menu. Using "By Distance" will mostly do what the old one did.

    • [C]-m - Followed by the axis (e.g. "x" or "y", etc) will mirror the object immediately. No copy. Mirrors cameras too if you need reversed images. Rename marker (time line). Works on points in grease pencil edit mode.

    • [C][S]-m - Curve modifier menu (noise, limit clamping, etc) in graph editor.

    • [A]-m - (EM) Split menu (by selection, faces by edges, faces&edges by vertices). Like Separate but keeps the geometry in the same object. Think of opening a box. Can also pull off bonus copies of edges if they’re selected alone. Clear box mask in sculpt mode.

  • n

    • Toggle "Properties Shelf" (right side) menus.

    • [S]-n - Recalculate normals. (If you need to see them, display normals with "Overlays" menu just over the Properties Shelf.) Recalculate handles in path EM.

    • [C]-n - New file.

    • [A]-n - Normals menu.

  • o

    • Proportional editing - note that the influence factor is controlled with the stupid mouse wheel.

  • p

    • Separate (EM), e.g. bones. Pinch (SculptMode). Set preview range (dope sheet, timeline).

    • [S]-p - In Shader/Node editor puts selected nodes in a frame.

    • [C]-p - Parent menu.

    • [A]-p - Clear preview range (dope sheet, timeline).

    • [C][A]-p - Auto-set preview range (dope sheet, timeline).

  • q

    • Quick favorites custom menu. Use RMB on menu actions to add them to the quick favorites menu.

    • [C]-q - Quit.

    • [C][A]-q - Toggle quad view. This means 4 viewports showing different ortho sides. Note that in quad view, for some reason Measureit annotations are invisible.

  • r

    • Rotate.

    • rr - Double rr goes to "trackball" mode.

    • [S]-r - Repeat last operation.

    • [C]-r - Loop cuts. Note that number of cuts is controlled with PgUp and PgDn. You can do partial cuts by hiding the faces (h) that form the boundary.

    • [A]-r - Reset rotation value of an object. Remove bone rotations in Pose Mode.

  • s

    • Scale. Set start frame to current position while in timeline.

    • [S]-s - Snap/cursor menu. Smooth (SculptMode). Save As from image editor. With Node Wrangler, replaces the selected node with a different one (like add, but replaces; or like c vs a in Vim).

    • [C]-s - Save file.

    • [S][A]-s - (EM) Turns an object into a sphere! (Does it need to be mainifold?)

    • [S][C][A]-s - Shear.

    • [A]-s - Resets scale? In Edit Mode it subjects selected geometry to the Shrink/Fatten tool which does pretty much what that sounds like. Remove bone scale changes in Pose Mode. In image editor saves the image. In movie tracking unhides the search area. In grease pencil edit mode, changes thickness of strokes where the points are selected. In path editing with handle selected, changes extrude width. In the Node/Shader Editor this swaps the input points of the current node.

  • t

    • Toggle main "3D View" tool shelf (left side) menus. Interpolation mode (dope sheet, graph editor).

    • [C]-t - Triangulate faces (inverse of [A]-j). In path editing with handle selected, changes tilt/twist of the curve. In the VSE, [C]-t changes the display from minutes:seconds+frames (02:15+00) to simple frames, matching every other default time display.

    • [S]-t - Flatten (Sculpt Mode). When lights are selected, they will follow the mouse cursor; works for multiple, select all lights by type to get all lights.

    • [C][S]-t - With Node Wrangler enabled and a (Principled BSDF, maybe others) shader selected, this will do a full "texture setup"; this will allow you to go select texture maps and it will put them all in the right boxes (an example).

  • u

    • UV mapping menu (EM). In draw mode it brings up the Change Active Material menu. In grease pencil edit mode, turns on bezier curve editing.

  • v

    • Rip Vertices (EM?). In grease pencil edit mode, makes selected points their own segment, detaching from the original. Probably that’s the general functionality of this too. Graph editor handle type. Node editor the mouse buttons affect the nodes, but if you want to scale the background preview image, try v and [A]-v.

    • [S]-v - Slide vertices (EM?). This constrains movement along existing geometry.

    • [C]-v - Paste. Or maybe Vertex menu depending on context.

    • [A]-v - Rip Vertices and fill (EM?). In node editor scales (out?) background preview image.

    • [S][C]-v - Paste but with inverted sense somehow. (A good example. Another good one at 17:40 too. I’ve seen examples of this working in setting keyframes with a mirrored pose.

  • w

    • Change selection mode (box, brush (circle), freeform border). In draw mode it is rumored to bring up the context menu. I’ve had problems with this not working very similar to what is described here; using RMB for the context menu works just fine.

    • [S]-w - Reconstruction pie menu in Movie Clip Editor’s Tracking mode? Use with the bend tool to do the bending.

    • [C]-w - Edit face set (SculptMode).

  • x

    • Delete. Draw tool in sculpt mode. Swap colors (c.v. Gimp) in Image Editor and Texture Paint.

    • In operations, constrain to x axis or with shift constrain other two.

    • [A]-x Delete unused nodes when using Node Wrangler.

  • y

    • In operations, constrain to y axis or with shift constrain other two. In draw mode, brings up Change Active Layer menu, which includes a New Layer option.

  • z

    • z - View mode.

    • [C]-z - Undo.

    • [S][C]-z - Redo.

    • [A]-z - Toggle X-ray (solid, but transparent) mode.

    • [S][A]-z - Toggle display of all overlay helpers (grid, axes, 3d cursor, etc).

    • In operations, constrain to z axis or with shift constrain other two.

This video has a lot of tips about shortcuts for the node editor.

Numpad Number Keys On Numeric Keypad

Since you have all those stupid useless keys sitting there that you never use, you might as well use them, right? Thought the Blender devs. Well I had a similar thought which was to get a less idiotic keyboard that didn’t have all that extraneous cruft. But Blender is really keen on being the one piece of software that justifies stupid keyboards. But there are tenuous workarounds.

The numpad numbers tend to change the view.

  • np1 - Front

  • np2 - Down

  • np3 - Side

  • np4 - Left

  • np5 - Perspective/Orthographic

  • np6 - Right

  • np7 - Top

  • np8 - Up

  • np9 - Opposite

  • np0 - Camera

  • np/ - Isolate selected by zooming to it and hiding everything else.

  • np+ - Zoom in. [C]-np+ in grease pencil edit mode selects more points near the ones selected.

  • np- - Zoom out. [C]-np- in grease pencil edit mode selects fewer points near the ones selected.

Strange And Uncertain Features

I’m still trying to sort out these features but am noting them here so they don’t get completely forgotten.

  • [Space] - Brings up the "search for it" menu. Just type the thing you want and that option is found often with its proper key binding shown. Looks like this has all changed a lot with 2.8+.

  • [C]-n - Reload Start-Up File (object mode) OR make normals consistent (edit mode)

  • [C]-b - draw a box which, when switched to "render" mode will render just a subsection

  • [C]-LMB - In edit mode, extrudes a new vertex to the position of the mouse target. Can be used like repeatedly extruding but without the dragging.

  • [C]-MMB - Amazingly, this can scale menus. For example to make them more readable or make more of it fit.

  • [A]-C - Convert. This converts some fancy object like a metaball or a path or text to a mesh. Or covert the other way from mesh to curve.

Edit Mode Keys

  • p - Separate geometry from the same mesh into multiple objects. The "loose parts" option makes each air gapped structure its own object.

Object Mode Keys

  • L - Make local menu.

  • [F6] - Edit object properties. Useful for changing the number of segments of round objects when you don’t have a mouse wheel.

Here is a necessarily bewildering key map reference from blender.org.

Note that if something like [A]-LMB tries to move the entire application window because that is how the Window manager is set up, it’s worth the effort to change that over to the Not-Exactly-Super key. For me on Mate, I go to System → Preferences → Look and Feel → Windows → Behaviour → Movement Key. Fixing that helps a lot with Blender.

Views

  • / - Toggle global/local view

  • [Home] - View all

  • [S]-F - Fly mode to AWSD controls (also E&Q for up/down, escape to exit)

  • . - View selected (Maybe only numpad)

  • 5 - Toggle Orthographic/Perspective

  • 1 - Front

  • [C]-1 - Back

  • 3 - Right

  • [C]-3 - Left

  • 7 - Top

  • [C]-7 - Bottom

  • 0 - Camera

  • [A]-h - Show hidden

  • H - Hide selected (also note [C]-LMB on the eye in the Outliner hierarchy)

  • [S]-H - Hide unselected

  • [A]-M - Merge - Makes two vertices the same. Or at least in the same place.

Note that the number keys are 10 number pad number keys; if the number keys want to change layers you may need to set "Emulate Numpad" in File → User Preferences → Input tab.

In Blender 2.8 some new useful interface features appear. Now you can go ahead and use the limited number keys (assuming you don’t have a stupid number pad) to select vertex, edge, or face editing. So how do you get quick access to viewports? Use the "`" backtick key to bring up a new style wheel menu from which you can use the mouse or numbers to select the view you want.

Simple Coloring

Often when modeling I would like something more helpful than everything showing up default gray. This can be done by going to the little down arrow box to the right of the "shading" menu which is located above the "n" menu on the upper right. Then you can choose "Random" and the objects will be colored in random different colors instead of default gray. That’s often enough for my simple needs.

Clipping Seems Stuck

Sometimes you’re looking at a model and it disappears and it becomes very difficult to find. This can happen when the clipping planes are set such that the whole model is cut out. To fix this, bring up the tool menu with "n" and then look for the "View" section and adjust the "Clip" values. Setting "Start" to 0 is a good way to try to get things back to visible.

Overlay Stuck Turned Off

Sometimes you want to see a grid and axes and all that good stuff. This one is related to the clipping problem because that may act up too. Maybe you only see the 3d cursor. You go to the overlays pull down and it all looks like it should be on. This tends to happen when I import something from someone else — especially if there was a conversion from some other kind of modeler. What may be going on is that the scale of the model is truly enormous. The solution can be as simple as changing the model’s units to something sane and scaling it to fit. Maybe press Home if you lose it when it shrinks back down. This can be quite mysterious to import, say, a flower and it’s the size of a 10 story building and the overlay is on and fine, just smaller than an aphid and practically invisible to the interface.

Scaling/Panning Seems Stuck

Sometimes it seems like you can’t zoom or pan the view. The trick here is to get the 3d-Editor window and go to ViewFrame Selected (formerly View Selected). This has a shortcut of . on the numpad (if you have one). That’s super frustrating so this tip can be very important.

Another solution that may be easier is to be in object mode (perhaps by pressing tab) and then press the "Home" key. This resets the view stuff. It would be nice to figure out what’s really going on there but persistent confusion may exist.

Background Images For Reference

A very common workflow technique is to freehand sculpt 3d assets on top of (or in front of, etc) a 2d reference image. These images don’t hang around for final rendering and are not part of the model per se. They are just available as helper guides to put things in roughly the right place so they look good with respect to reference material.

New 2.8 Way

The new system in 2.8+ is set up for a special kind of "empty" to contain an image. These can be created by inserting [S]-a "Image". This gives you a choice of "Reference" or "background". It seems that background images will show other objects in front of them while reference images may still be persistently visible. This has some subtleties explained here.

Here are the three kinds of image objects.

  • Reference - Can be at any orientation. It is basically an empty with a scaled image instead of axes or arrow or some other marker. Like all empties, it doesn’t render.

  • Background - Very few and subtle differences from the reference image empty. The main one I found is that it won’t render the back side of the rectangle while a reference empty will. Also, solid mesh objects will be shown over the background image even if that empty is closer to the camera or viewer — this puts the image always in the background. A -1 scale will flip the images.

  • Images As Planes - Can do anything a plane can do, but with your image slapped on it as a texture automatically. This means that this plane with its image is renderable where the other types are not visible at render.

In the Empty’s settings you can specify a check box if you want it to be visible in Perspective, Orthographic, both, or neither. Orthographic can be helpful if you have a front photo, a top photo, and a side photo and want the others to go away when you switch views.

If two empty images share the same distance from the viewer and are superimposed, the one that is rendered is the one closest overall (in perspective). You can see this by putting two images in the same place and g sliding one up half way. Then change the view position to look from high, then low and the order will change.

Background HDRI Images

Sometimes you try to render something shiny (or anything actually) and it looks very computery because there’s nothing normal out in the wider world reflecting naturally off the object. This is especially problematic with isolated objects which look pretty unnatural just floating in space. To help cure this, you need to tell Blender’s "world" about what sort of ambient background is out there.

A decent place to start looking for environment textures is this site (aka this URL).

You could do worse than to start at Poly Haven and go to their HDRI section. Pick one that is somewhat like the mood of the scene you’re going for and download it.

Note that this file can be a .exr or .hdr file. Best to stick to OpenEXR which was created by ILM and seems wholesome. Blender created the OpenEXR Multilayer format which is an extension of that which is slightly less universally supported and probably not necessary if you don’t know you need it. All of these seem compressed but lossless.

To get Blender to start using this HDRI as a background: Go to the World Properties tab. Click Color and under Texture choose Environment Texture. This will then provide a file box where you can specify the path to your file.

If you want to adjust how your image is sitting on the background open up the Shader Node Editor. Choose the World pull down (next to the editor type icon). Then add two nodes: a texture coordinate node (from Input section) and a mapping node (from Vector section). Connect the Texture Coordinate’s Generated output into the vector input of the mapping Node. Connect the mapping node’s vector output to the hdr image node’s vector input. By playing with things in the mapping node, especially the Z rotation, you can get what you need. This process is explained in this video.

HDRI stands for High Dynamic Range Image and is often made of images taken with a camera at multiple exposure settings so it can provide more information about what the scene is doing in different conditions (no regions washed out or too dark). Here are some good examples.

This kind of image can be assembled with Gimp — here’s a decent beginner guide. And a more in depth guide.

It should be possible to make the dynamic range "high" with Gimp. To make stitched panoramas, you can look into Hugin. Compiling it is no fun but it seems to be available with apt install hugin.

Old Way - Pre 2.8

Make sure the "Properties Shelf" is on with "n". Look for "Background Images" down near the bottom — you might have to scroll. Click "Add Image". Select your image from the file system. The rest is pretty self-explanatory once you find it. If nothing shows up, you may not be aligned to the correct view. Pressing 7 will show a reference image set to display on "top" views.

If that still doesn’t work, you are probably in "Perspective" mode even though you pressed 7 and it sure doesn’t look like it. Double check that it does not say "Top Persp" in the top left corner of the modeling window — it should say "Top Ortho". To toggle, make sure the mouse is hovering over the modeling window and press 5.

Remember that the control settings can be specific to a window. For example, you may have a top down view that is blocked by your model. You set the top down view property to "front" and nothing happens. But if you set that property in the side view, it will be thinking that’s what you want only in that window if you change to top view. To have the window showing your top view take those properties, you have to go there and press "n" to open the properties and set it there.

Origin And 3D-Cursor

I find the distinction here can be tricky to get used to.

The origin is the tri-colored unit vectors with a white circle around it. The 3d-Cursor is a red/white circle crosshairs. Position the 3D-Cursor by LMB; note that it should stick to the things (e.g. faces) sensibly. Note that this is less obvious in wireframe mode. When in "Object Mode" in the tool shelf, there can sometimes be an "Edit" submenu; in that can be found a "Set Origin" pull down. This includes "Geometry to Origin" and "Origin to Geometry". Also "Origin to 3D Cursor" and "Origin to Center of Mass".

  • [S][C][A]-c - Bring up menu for origin management (pre 2.8 - see below)

  • . - Move origin to 3D-Cursor. In 2.8+ this sets the pivot point in a handy way.

  • [S]-C - center view on something pleasant and move the 3-d cursor to origin

  • [S]-S - Open snap menu, handy for putting the 3d cursor to selected or grid, etc. One of the best techniques for positioning the cursor is to use [S]-S and then "Cursor To Selected" which will put it perfectly in the middle of the face.

In 2.8+ to reposition the origin of your objects, select the object in object mode, click the "Object" button on the bottom menu, choose "Set Origin", and pick the thing you need such as "Origin to Geometry". Or in Object Context Menu (RMB in OM) look for "Set Origin" - also easy.

3d Cursor

In old Blender (pre 2.8), when you clicked with the most natural LMB action, the 3d cursor was placed. Although this only is true now if in the cursor tool mode ([S]-space space), clearly this action is thought to be important. What the hell is it good for?

  • It is where new objects will show up.

  • The "origin" can be moved to it.

  • It can be where things rotate if you set — pivot point (button right of display mode button) → 3d Cursor

  • Optionally where the view rotates — "n" menu → "View" Section → "Lock To Cursor" checked — This is worth doing!

To set the 3d cursor’s location more specifically than random LMB madness, there are a couple of different options.

  • If you want a rough position, the LMB will work, but in v2.8+ make sure you’re in the Cursor mode and not, say, the Select Box mode.

  • In the "n" menu under the "View" tab, the "3D Cursor" section has a form box for explicit entry of X,Y,Z location.

  • Often you want the cursor placed with respect to some geometry. [S]-s brings up the cursor placement wheel menu. Doing [S]-s and then 2 will put the cursor on the selected geometry. Note that by doing this and checking the "n" menu’s coordinates (see previous item) you can take measurements and find out locations. Another example to clarify this useful use case is if you want the cursor at the "endpoint" of some other edge in the model.

  • Note that when you get the cursor on some existing geometry, you can go to the View→3d Cursor section of the "n" menu and put math operations in the location box. So if you want to move the cursor up from a known endpoint you can [S]-s,2 select the endpoint, then go to the Z box for 3d cursor location and put "+2.5" after whatever is there to move the cursor up 2.5 units.

Some technical details:

C.scene.cursor_location             # Query
C.scene.cursor_location= (0,0,1)    # Set
C.scene.cursor_location.x += .1     # Increment X in a controlled way

To see where this comes in handy, see measuring distances.

Measuring Distances

What if you simply want to know the distance between two points in your model? Not so easy at all with Blender! (Well, at least according to this very bad answer to the question.)

It looks like in 2.8, there is now a prominent feature to measure stuff! Yay! How this got overlooked until now is a complete mystery.

To use it check out [S]-space + m. (This was formerly [A]-space I believe.) LMB hold on the first point to measure. Then drag to the second point. If you mess it up, you can pick up the ends and reposition them. You can also use [C] to constrain the endpoints of the measurement to snap points.

If these little measurement lines hang around as dashed lines, it can be tricky to delete them. Click on the ends of the unwanted phantom measurement ruler and then del or x.

MeasureIt Tools

There is an included add-on that is pretty nice which creates dimension line geometry. With the new native "Measure" tools, this add-on (and other similar ones) become a lot less important. However, if you need to actively communicate dimensions as in a shop print, this add-on is still excellent.

Generally to use it, you simply select two vertices or 1 edge in Edit Mode and click the "Segment" button. Sometimes tweaking the position is required. See troubleshooting below.

Troubleshooting MeasureIt

Don’t see MeasureIt in the "View" tab of the "n" menu? Maybe the addon is not enabled. Look at Edit → Preferences → Add-ons and check the box for "3D View: MeasureIt".

An annoying flaw that has frustrated me is the addon’s visibility is off by default!! Note the "Show" button — if you click that it will make the measurements from the addon visible. Clicking it again will "Hide" the measurements. It’s frustrating because you assume the default to show the stuff if you’ve bothered to use it, but that’s not how it works.

Note that for some annoying reason MeasureIt annotations are invisible in quad view! This is problematic because if you’re doing something technical that could make use of MeasureIt, you’re also more likely to be using quad view. As a reminder for how to turn it off, try [C][A]-q to toggle and ` for individual view selection.

You can see the dimension lines but they are all crazy and not at all properly automatically lined up with the mesh or axes or anything discernible. If you expand the settings (the little gear icon) on one of the measurements in the "Items" list, it will have a checkbox for "Automatic Position". Obviously you want automatic positioning, so turn OFF automatic position! I found that to cure alignment issues. Maybe then you’ll need to play around with "Change Orientation In __ Axis" to really put the aligned dimension where it should be.

If you’re trying to make a final render with the MeasureIt dimension lines included, you will be disappointed. The way it works is that the measurement lines are created in their own separate transparent image. One thing to keep in mind is to export RGB*A* (not RGB), especially if you’re just looking at the measureit_output in the Image Editor (check the "Browse Image" thingy to the left of the image name to see if there’s a second image from MeasureIt hiding in there).

Importing the scene render’s final image and the MeasureIt overlay image into layers in Gimp, you can combine them for what you’re after. Or use ImageMagic

composite measureit_output.png coolpart.png coolpart_w_dims.png

Keeping the undimensioned one can maybe be used nicely to toggle the dimensions on and off with JavaScript.

DIY Python Measurments

My technique is as follows.

  • Select the object of the first point.

  • Tab to be in edit mode.

  • "a" until selection is clear.

  • Make sure vertex mode is on.

  • Select the first point.

  • [S]-s to do a "Cursor to Selected".

  • In a Python console type this: p1= C.scene.cursor_location.copy()

  • Select the second point in a similar way.

  • [S]-s to do a "Cursor to Selected" again.

  • In a Python console type this: p2= C.scene.cursor_location.copy()

  • Then: print(p2-p1)

Also in Edit mode, under "Mesh Display" there is checkbox for showing edge "Length" info. But that has its limitations too if the points are on different objects. Note that this can show comically incorrect values! The problem is (may be) that an object was scaled in object mode and the transformation was not "applied". Try [C]-a to apply transforms. I was able to go to object mode, select all with a, and then [C]-a and then apply rotation and scale. Details about this problem.

Volume Measurements

Sometimes you want to design something complicated and know how much concrete or 3d printing pixie dust the thing will require. Blender has an extension called Mesh:3D Printing Toolbox which can do this. Just go to user preferences, "Add-ons" and check it. Then you’ll get a tab for that. You can then click volume or area for a selected thing and go to the bottom of that panel to see the results.

Layers

Those little 2x5 grids in the menu bars are layer slots. To change the layer of an object, select it and press "m". This brings up a layer grid to select where you want it. To view multiple layers you can click on the boxes in the grid using shift for multiple layers.

Grid

The basic grid seems like the kind of thing that should be controlled in user preferences (like Inkscape) but it is not. Turn on the "n" menu and look for the "Display" section. There is a selection for which axis you want the "Grid Floor" to be (usually Z). Then adjust the scale and size.

Objects

Objects can be dragged around and placed in different hierarchical arrangements in the "Outliner". I’ve had this sometimes get stuck and it’s pretty strange, but reloading can cure it.

Having a good object hierarchy can make operations easier since it allows finer control of hiding or excluding from rendering.

To create a different object that is not part of an existing mesh, use [S]-d for "duplicate" and then hit the "p" key which will bring up the "separate" menu allowing the "Selected" object (or "All Loose Parts") to be made into their own objects.

The complimentary operation is to join objects. For example, if you input some reference lines on a boat hull and each is its own object, you can’t put faces on them. You must join them to the same object first. In object mode, select both of the objects and pres [C]-j and they will be part of the same mesh.

Parenting

Parenting is a very important concept that allows objects to be organized. I used it less than I should have for a long time because the metaphor was confusing to me — children are not normally the first to appear in a family followed by the parent. But in Blender, selecting objects to make a parent child relationship, that is exactly how it is done.

For me a much better metaphor that conveniently starts with the letter p, makes the selection order and one to many aspects seem natural is to mentally replace the Blender verb "parent" with "piggyback". Or "piggyback on to". As an added bonus, "piggyback" implies a physical connection that is usually relevant in so-called parented objects. While it’s true that multiple passengers don’t usually ride the piggy at the same time, it’s totally plausible if the piggy is strong enough. (Certainly more plausible than a child having only one biological parent - ahem.) This dictionary definition of the verb piggyback pretty much exactly sums up what Blender parenting is: "to set up or cause to function in conjunction with something larger, more important, or already in existence or operation".

Some rumors believe that after [C]-p to do the parenting you should use the "Object (Keep Transform)" option. Not 100% sure about that — I don’t understand the drawbacks — but it seems to work out.

If you want to temporarily suspend parenting effects, with the parented object selected you can go to the "Active Tool and Workspace settings" tab (which looks like a screwdriver and a wrench) and choose "Options"; then one of the "Transform" options will be to "Affect Only… Parents". Check that and the parent can be adjusted with the children staying fixed.

For bones, the general strategy is that distal bones piggyback on the proximal bones — so for example, the tib-fib (shin bone) piggybacks on or is parented to the femur (thigh bone). There the femur is the parent, selected last before during the parenting operation.

Simple Things Not So Simple

With Blender it is strangely easier to model a cow than a simple Euclidean line. Seriously, just getting a simple line is strangely challenging. I’m not the only one who ran into this (here and here).

As far as I can tell, you must create a complicated entity (like a plane) and remove vertices until it is as simple as you like. There may be a better way to get started, but I don’t know it.

Use [A]-m to merge vertices to a single point!

Once you have chopped something down to a line (or even a single vertex), you can extend that line to new segments by Ctrl-LMB; this will extend your line sequence to where the live pointer is (not the origin thing).

Another similar way is to select the point to "extend" and press e (for "extend") and then you can drag out a new line segment. This is less precise in some ways because it is not right under the mouse position. However, this technique can be very helpful to press e and then something like x then + then 3 which extends the line sequence to the positive X by 3 units. Not putting the sign can result in absolute coordinates. Press Enter when you’re done.

It looks like there is now an add-on that addresses this nonsense. Go to Preferences → Add-ons and search for Add Mesh: Extra Objects. This will give you many things like Mesh → Single Vert → Add Single Vert. Also Curve → Line (though it may be better to extrude that "Single Vert"). There are a lot more too. Worth activating!

Tubes, Pipes, Cables, Complex 3d Shapes

A very common task I have when modeling is something like a racing bicycle’s handlebars or its brake cables or a curved railing or drain p-trap, etc. Any kind of free-form piping or tubing. Of course there is a way to do this in Blender and luckily it’s not too horrifically difficult.

Round

If you just need a normal round pipe or cable, it seems this is now easier than ever. Just create the pipe’s path with Add → Curve → Bezier. Then go to "Object Data Properties" whose icon should look like a curve and is right above the Materials icon. Open up the "Bevel" and choose "Round". You can adjust the "Depth" setting to change the thickness of the pipe; in theory this is the "radius of the bevel geometry" but be careful, because in practice I couldn’t quite get that to make sense.

Custom Profile

This video explains the classic technique. Here’s another video that may be even easier. They are similar in concept.

Basically, you need to create two objects.

  • A "Path" under Add → Curve → Path which will guide the pipe’s trajectory.

  • A "Nurbs Circle" under Add → Curve → Nurbs Circle. This will be the pipe’s profile. Note that this is not a regular mesh circle! I’m assuming it can be any kind of path since a circle — unless you scale it into an ellipse or something — is better achieved with the "round" technique described above.

Select the pipe path’s properties in the "Data" section of the properties menu (between the Materials and Modifiers). Go down to "Bevel Object" and choose your profile Nurbs Circle.

From there simply select the path and go to edit mode and manipulate the path’s spline.

To finish up, you can select the pipe and RMB to get the object menu and choose "Convert to Mesh". Now you can delete the circle.

Dividing A Curve Or Roughly Measure Tube Length

Imagine modeling a bathroom sink with a supply line you know from real world measurements is 18" long. How would that look when you hook up the shut-off valve to the faucet supply? I do not know how to specify a curve with a fixed length, but you can do trial an error until you get it the right length.

How do you measure the length? This video provides some hints, but it’s a bit too quick and maybe not 2.8 friendly. The best way I could deploy was to create a small temporary object to use as a measuring device. Position it so that it is at the beginning of the pipe. Then with that new cube object selected in object mode, add a "Curve" modifier. Select the path of the pipe you’re trying to measure. Then slide the position of the cube along its new special X axis which will be along the curve. By sliding the cube object up and down the curve by adjusting its X position you can now get a rough start and end point for your pipe. Subtract and that’s your length. Roughly. Keep reading to understand this concept better with a different but relevant objective.

Sometimes you have an elegant shape that needs to be regularly spaced along its length. This is related to a way to measure curves. For making a ruler with straight edges, you can used the subdivide feature. But what if the thing is not straight. For example, perhaps you have a winding road that needs regularly spaced striped lane lines. Or perhaps you’re doing a stitch and glue boat and you need the final segments/triangles that comprise the curve of the hull pieces to have exactly the same spacing.

  • Start with a curve object that is the object of interest. In this example, the road.

  • Check setting for Curve → Properties → Active Spline → Endpoint. This allows the end of the curve to be handled precisely and not dangle in an unknown place.

  • Make a mesh of the road stripe — basically a single horizontal edge aligned so that it’s pointing to positive X. This mesh will be arrayed in the X direction by exactly its X width until it fills the length of the curve (and maybe some remainder’s overhang). Note it will not follow the curve without another modifier; it will just go straight and the length of the curve is just to limit the number of iterations.

  • Go into edit mode, select the left vertex of the stripe mesh and put the 3d cursor there with "[S]-s 2". Then switch out of edit mode with tab and "RMB o t" to Set Origin → Origin To 3D Cursor.

  • Move the stripe mesh with "g" so that its left end is on the end of the left road curve. Use [C] to snap to make sure it is exact. It may be smart to put the origin of the stripe mesh at the left end of the stripe to prevent offsets during the array.

  • Double check in the Item panel of the n menu that the Rotation and Scale for the road curve and the stripe mesh match.

  • Select the stripe mesh and add an Array modifier.

    • For the Fit Type, choose the Fit Curve method and select the road curve for the curve.

    • Consider the Merge option if the final divided segment is continuous. For road stripes, maybe don’t merge because you will want to delete every other segment. You could also do a Relative Offset → Factor of 2 for a striped road. Or a Constant Offset and choose the exact spacing you require.

  • With the stripe mesh still active, add a second modifier, a Curve modifier. Again choose the road curve for the curve.

Mapping Complex 2d Shapes

The most common problem I have to solve with Blender is not sculpting a cube into a bunny but rather taking some engineered product from the real world and modeling it. Real world things usually aren’t so organically 3d and there are aspects of them that the designer simplified. For example, let’s say I’m trying to model an intersection for a vehicle simulation, I can pretty much assume that the designer of the road first thought about it in two dimensions before moving onto worry about camber and slopes. My workflow is very similar.

I often take a reference photo as described and what I want to do is just trace some geometry around important features to get started. But Blender, as far as I can tell, is terrible at this simple task. Well, it certainly does not emphasize it as important workflow, but, like all things in Blender, it is possible.

In object mode (tab to toggle) use the menu Add → Mesh → Plane and put a plane near where the geometry in question starts on the photo. Then "gZ" to move (in XY only) the plane square so that one of the points is where one of your model’s points should be. Go to edit mode (tab) and get rid of half the plane with "ab" (select all, bounding box) and grab two of the most incorrect points with a box. Then "x" to delete the vertices. Oh, another way is to have them all selected and do [A]-m and "Merge at Center" which will leave you with a single point at the center ready for action.

Now you have a line with one of the points correctly placed. Still in edit mode, select the incorrect point and "gZ" it to a correct location. With it still selected, do "eZ" to extend that point into a new line/point and put that on the next feature point of your model. Continue repeating this extending until you have the whole thing outlined.

Note that it’s just weird lines unless you can close them back up. For the final point that should be back where you started, you can put the point anywhere near. Then use "ab" and select both the beginning and ending point and do "[A]-m" to merge them. You may need to reset their location but that should be it.

Now with all the points of this object selected you can "ez" to extend in the Z axis and give that some thickness. You can use "f" to but a top and bottom on it. Now you have a complex shape that you can sculpt.

Insert A Vertex

My main modeling strategy is to make long chains of line segments that fit the geometry in all views and then later join and face them. This means that I often am making long line extensions that turn out to need another vertex when the curve from another axis is taken into account. How can a vertex be added between two existing ones? In edit mode I select the two bounding vertices and use the edge loop feature — press [C]-r and then enter. The enter is important or it won’t take.

One task that comes up a lot is that a face needs more detail and it needs to be split into two faces. Imagine you want to transform the stock cube into a little house with a peaked roof. You basically want the top face to be two faces each 1x.5. Then you can just "g" position that edge up in the Z a bit and you have your house. But how to make that split? First select the two opposite edges that will be getting the new roof peak edge. Look in the "tools" menu for the "Subdivide" button. Click that and make sure you press enter to confirm the settings (which are settable in the lower left corner, in the tools panel).

Reorganizing Mesh Geometry Into Desired Objects

Often with the frenzy of extrude operations needed to get accurate geometry, you wind up with some silly organization. For example, I might extrude along a wall and then up a door edge, over the door’s width, back down the door height and then continue along the wall. This would be based on measurements of the room and door. But at the end of it all, I probably want an object representing the floor or walls and a separate object representing the door. How does one break out the door object?

My best guess for doing this which seems to work is to go into edit mode with the object selected that has the geometry you want to liberate. Select just that subset you want to make a new object out of. Then [S]-d seems to reasonably create in-mesh duplicates. This is also a good tip for doing things like repeating framing studs or some other repetitive geometry that might reasonably all be in the same mesh.

Once you have the geometry to create a new object from selected, press "p" which brings up the "Separate" menu. Since your geometry of interest is selected, choose "By Selection".

If you’re trying to hop some geometry from one object to the other, you can select the new object and the target object and use [C]-j to join the objects.

Loop Cuts

Loop cuts are very powerful and in dense meshes they can be quite intuitive. But in simple sparse geometry, they can get quite perplexing. The general idea is to go to edit mode and then edge select mode. From there use [C]-r to start the loop cut process; move the mouse around and little yellow guides should show you where your cut will happen.

You can use the page up and page down keys to adjust the number of cuts. (A mouse wheel, the normal clumsy way to do this, is not needed.)

When you’re happy with it, press enter. Now you should be in sliding mode where you can slide your loop cuts along the loops. If you did sliding by accident, you can use the RMB to put them back in the middle, without sliding. If you don’t want sliding at all, just press enter twice when accepting the cut.

Loop cuts provide a bizarre but serviceable trick for accurate technical modeling. A very common requirement in technical modeling is the need for a new feature a known distance away from some other feature. Imagine a face that represents a wall in a house - if you want to add a window, you need to make some cuts in that face where the window actually is. You can measure where the window is in the house, say, 40" from the corner of the room. To model this, do a loop cut. You get the orientation right, hit enter, and during the sliding phase, you slide this new window edge all the way into the corner of the room. Hit enter to accept this. That seems useless, but now you have the correct geometry to use "g" on the selected geometry, constrain it to the appropriate axis (with "x" or "y" probably) and type the exact value to put it in the right place ("40"). Now you have fresh geometry exactly where it should be based on numerical measurements.

Sometimes the loop cut extends farther than you’d like and you want to rejoin some cut faces. Use the face mode, select the faces to join and from the RMB menu use "Dissolve Faces".

This is a very strange workflow but doable once you get used to it.

Knife Tool Cut

  • [Space] - finishes knife tool operation

  • S - suppress the auto snapping.

  • [C] - snap to midpoints

Triangulate

Do you love triangles? I do. But Blender likes to hide the triangular truth of computer science from you. You can go into face mode and select non triangular faces and press [C]-t. This will triangulate them.

Modifiers

When I first was learning Blender I couldn’t quite understand exactly what the "modifiers" were doing or when or to what. For example, some modeling software keeps lists of boolean constructions instead of actual geometry. The resultant geometry is just calculated on the fly when needed. So are Blender modifiers like this? Not exactly.

Modifiers are a way to truly modify some mesh geometry. The confusion arises because they can be set up and sometimes previewed before the target geometry is actually modified. They can be stacked so that two modifiers are set to modify some geometry and if you like how it’s going, hit apply and they actual modification will be done. Generally you’ll want to start at the top modifier and keep hitting "Apply" as the rest bubble up to the top to do multiple modifiers.

Modifiers show up under the object in the hierarchy while they’re being adjusted. They disappear when you "Apply" them.

There are a ton of these modifiers — so many that it’s hard to keep track of them. A very good resource is the Modifier Encyclopedia which contains descriptions and examples.

Mesh Cache

Modify Category
  • Mesh Cache - Reuse rigged characters for crowds and exporting.

  • UV Project - Adjust a texture by orienting an empty object.

  • UV Warp - Like UV Project but can be animated for scrolling and other effects.

  • Vertex Weight Edit - Animate changes to vertex weighting.

  • Vertex Weight Mix - Vertex weighting from variable sources.

  • Vertex Weight Proximity - Changes weighting based on distance. E.g. something melting near a heat source.

Generate Category
  • Array

  • Bevel

  • Boolean

  • Build

  • Decimate

  • Edge Split - Useful for smoothing except where you want sharp edges. Puts a sharp edge on angles sharper than a certain threshold or thus marked by the sharp attribute (which seems to be a thing). Also handy for normal fixing when exporting to Unity. Details.

  • Mask - a way to turn off certain vertex groups. Also for hiding meshes not related to the bone you’re currently rigging. Details.

  • Mirror

  • Multiresolution - for L.o.D. model sets

  • Remesh - Turns meshes into quads.

  • Screw

  • Skin

  • Solidify

  • Subdivision Surface

  • Triangulate

  • Wireframe

Deform Category
  • Armature

  • Cast - morphing animations

  • Curve

  • Displace - deforms based on a texture map. Interesting for topo maps.

  • Hook - pull other objects' vertices when interacting in animations.

  • Laplacian Smooth - denoise rough textures but keeps the overall shape.

  • Laplacian Deform - keep relationships intact while deforming the model. Similar to using bones, but more rubbery.

  • Lattice - Deform mesh to conform to a cage.

  • Mesh Deform - Deform a mesh using another mesh as a control.

  • Shrinkwrap - Conform a spline to a mesh; good for a road on terrain. Put the modifier on the thing to project (e.g. the road) and select the object onto which it should be projected as target. Note that the quality can be very poor for very low poly models - this seems to like lots of geometry to work with.

  • Simple Deform - Twist, bend, stretch, taper in ways that can be animated.

  • Smooth - Smoother than Laplacian Smooth but letting the geometry get lower fidelity.

  • Warp - Animate part of a mesh deforming to a different location.

  • Wave - Things like a flag blowing. Looks like simple trig function.

Simulate Category
  • Cloth - Complex cloth physics.

  • Collision - Objects falling and behaving correctly.

  • Dynamic Paint - Objects leaving trails behind as they do physics (as in Collision).

  • Explode - Like build but with animations to make the parts fly away.

  • Fluid Simulation - Useful for the quantities of liquid involved in a glass spilling.

  • Ocean - A bonkers accurate simulation of open water waves, with wind and chop, etc.

  • Particle Instance - Change mesh of particles.

  • Particle System - Grass, hair, all kinds of fancy stuff.

  • Smoke - puffs of smoke.

  • Soft Body - like a body with no bones. Or a water balloon.

Array

Repeats a line of objects. If you want a higher dimensional array, stack multiple modifiers.

You can use an empty (which is an object type) object and use that in the "Object Offset" field to control the offset, rotation, and scale of each object with respect to the previous. This sets you up to have interesting tentacle-like constructions (e.g. scaled and rotated).

Interestingly the array modifier can also be used to get the effect of tube bending (bicycle handlebars, corkscrews, etc.). This is not exactly easy, but if you set up a hollow profile of your tube and the array it with a relative offset, you can then add another modifier, a curve modifier which can constrain the path of the arrayed objects. You can add a bezier curve to guide the path and then link that as the object of the curve modifier. The same video has a very quick demonstration of this towards the end.

Polar Arrays

Unfortunately just accomplishing a simple polar array (e.g. bolt circle) seems absurdly tricky. But it is possible. The second half of this video and this one covers this trick, but it isn’t super obvious or easy to use. Basically you need to add an "empty" type object to the center of your polar array; disable relative offset and enable object offset. You also must make sure your mesh’s geometry center is in the polar center. Choose the number of items you want. Nothing seems to happen until you rotate the object around the geometry center which should also be where the empty is. You have to put in the rotational angle manually for a single interval. For example, if you want and specified 6 objects and your object is at the 3d cursor you can "rz60" and all 6 should appear and correctly rotated in place. Note that before you apply this modifier, you should [C]-a to apply transformations; this will prevent a weird spiraling out of control look.

If you fuss with it enough, it can theoretically be used for spiral staircases and helices like DNA, etc. It might be best to just add a circle and change the number of vertices and then place things to them using the 3d cursor. Not fun or easy, but at least no heroic mental gymnastics.

Another completely different technique is quite tolerable when you have a tame number of items in your bolt circle. If you have 6 items and know that the angle between them is 60 degrees (or 4 for 90, or 5 for 72, or 8 for 45, etc) you can do the following. Make sure that your pivot point is on the 3d cursor. Then select the object you want replicated. Duplicate it with [S]-d (or [A]-d if a shallow copy makes sense) and instead of hitting enter or moving the new object, hit r to rotate. Assuming your 3d cursor is in the middle of the bolt circle type in that angle. That’s one copy done. Then hit [S]-r to repeat the last action and you can fill out the others very quickly and easily with a minimum of cognitive fuss.

Note that I’ve found it helpful to create geometry from the faces of cylinders. A very interesting trick is "Deselect checkered" which can leave every other face selected. From there you can build them out as if they were individually created and placed with a polar array.

Bevel

This basically can break sharp edges with what machinists call chamfers (1 intermediate surface per edge) or fillets (rounded edges, in Blender that means as many subdivisions as you’d like to allocate). There are other tools that can do this but they suffer from the extremely annoying problem of requiring a scroll wheel. If you do not have one that is convenient this modifier can be a big help. If you only want a subset of your object’s geometry affected by the bevel operations, just define a vertex group (Edit Mode → Mesh → Vertices → Vertex Groups → Assign To New Group). After that the vertex group will probably be gone so you might want to Remove From All in the same menu.

There is a non-modifier operation that does bevels tool. The important key binding is [C]-b but only if you have a scroll wheel. This tip discusses and shows both methods.

Here’s a very good video that shows some advanced topics with the bevel modifier.

Boolean Composition

A very powerful way to construct complex but realistic geometric shapes is to compose them as a series of additions and subtractions of simpler shapes.

The operation I find most useful is subtraction. Imagine an apple as shape A and a bite out of the apple as shape B. The Apple logo could be described as A minus B. To achieve this…

  1. Select the A shape.

  2. Go to the modifiers wrench in the properties bar.

  3. Choose "Add Modifier→Boolean"

  4. Change "Operation" to "Difference".

  5. To the right of the Operation click the "Object" button.

  6. Select the B object from the list.

  7. View the previewed change with wire frame mode.

  8. Commit to the change with "Apply".

  9. B may disappear and A will be suitably modified. Or B will still hang around and you have to manually erase it leaving the subtracted A.

The other modes work similarly.

There is an addon called BoolTool that ships with Blender that dramatically streamlines this janky workflow by putting a sensible direct menu right in the n shelf.

Troubleshooting Boolean Operations
  • Are all the scales applied? [C]-a, choose Scale. Do this in object mode for the modified object and any target objects.

  • Are your normals nonsensical? You can turn on visual representations of them from the overlays menu (Display Normals - "Display face normals as lines.") Those can be hard to see and then you have to adjust the normal fuzz to be tractable to keep from getting a huge porcupine ball. Often the better check in these diagnostic situations is to select the Face Orientation option in the Overlays menu. This will show the surface as blue on the normal side and red on the back (inverse normal) side. To fix normals, go to Edit Mode, 3 for face select and select the problematic faces (a for all if they all are) then [A]-n to bring up the normal menu. Choose Flip or Recalculate Outside. You can also just tab into Edit mode and press [S]-n to do a quick recalculate outside on all the faces (which are generally selected when you initially switch from object mode).

  • Are you sure your target objects are named or specified correctly. (I often name them "AAAA", etc., so they are at the top of the target pull down list, and I have had confusion with multiple cutting objects getting mixed up.)

  • If you’re using multiple boolean modifiers, try them in isolation to make sure each operation works alone.

  • It’s probably unwise to have cut and cutting objects have wildly different polygon densities.

  • Things can get messy when the cut and the cutter are almost coinciding.

Here is a good thorough article on this exact topic.

Build

This allows animating the appearance (or disappearance) of all of the faces in an object. Give it a starting frame and an ending frame and the objects will start at nothing and by the end frame create the whole object. You can use "Randomize" to have it fade in or disintegrate like it’s being teleported. If you want it to have a definite order search (Space) for the "Sort Mesh Elements" menu and choose the order you want the faces. "View Axis" builds farthest away from you first and fills in towards you so you don’t obscure the building. This might be good for an effect like leaving interesting tracks behind a vehicle.

Decimate

Only works in object mode. Ratio of 1 leaves 100% while 0 removes them all. Of course nothing happens with this modifier visually and you have to apply it to see any evidence at all that it worked. The nice bonus of this modifier for people like me who think computer graphics should be based on triangles is that the new mesh will try to be triangles. Yay!

Mirror

Unfortunately there are only 873 ways to mirror objects in Blender — all of them are pretty baroque.

The most basic non-modifier way is to just basically do a single axis scale of -1. If a mirrored copy is needed, duplicate the object first. The real trick is to mirror about some specific point. It can be done but like all point specifying in Blender, it can be way harder than it should be.

Here’s the process for modeling a single symmetrical thing. This is different than two distinct symmetrical bookend type objects.

  1. Model one half of your boat, car, person, etc. Let’s say the starboard side only for this example. Just leave the port side completely empty. Plan all your modeling to leave port blank.

  2. Round up all the center points (bow, keel line, etc) and make sure they are the same. Ideally if the boat is pointing toward positive X and centered on the origin then make sure that all the center points have a Y of 0.

  3. You must establish the pivot point. This will be the orange dot for the object.

    • [Tab] for edit mode.

    • Select a vertex on the centerline.

    • [Tab] for object mode.

    • [C]-[S]-[A]-c

    • Origin to geometry (if it balks check mode!)

    • Select the object to mirror.

    • [S]-d to duplicate it (or not to just invert some geoemtry).

    • "s" for scale.

    • "x", "y", or "z" for the axis to scale.

    • "-1" to invert the values.

    • Select the other one and [C]-j to join them if desired.

    • Fix normals. Try [C]-n or [C]-[S]-n maybe.

Note that the Mirror modifier is a way to generate mirrored geometry. This instantiates when the modifier is "applied" leaving you with new geometry on the object which can then be independently changed. It is reasonable to model a symmetrical thing with this unapplied modifier dangling the whole time. There is, however, a technique I like better using linked copies. I think the overhead is similar.

To make a proper and efficient symmetrical thing, say the hull of a boat, a decent technique is to create a linked duplicate (with [A]-d). This has all the placement and scale properties of an independent object, but its mesh data comes from the original from which it was cloned. Therefore you can make a linked duplicate and then scale that around an axis by -1x as long your geometry origin is on your mirror plane. This way you can continue to just work on one half (port) while the other (starboard) half takes care of itself.

Just don’t forget to make your pivot point the 3d cursor! See 18:37 here to see what I mean. (It defaults to the geometry Median Point.)

Mirror Naming Conventions

Blender has some deep dark functionality that can understand and do the right thing with symmetrical pairs of items — basically imagine a left arm bone and a right one. Messy details are here. Blender is pretty flexible about the conventions it accepts. But let’s be consistent and go with the one that Blender itself prefers when the "AutoName" feature is used.

Name symmetrical pairs of objects with the following convention.

  • Left - MyObjectName.L

  • Right - MyObjectName.R

  • Front - MyObjectName.Fr

  • Back - MyObjectName.Ba

  • Top - MyObjectName.Top

  • Bottom - MyObjectName.Bot

Screw

What the calculus books call "solid of revolution". This can do helices too (a little easier than the array modifier). This one seems reasonably straightforward, but if not, here’s a decent demo.

Skin

This is a very neat modifier that can take some reasonably simple wire frame thing and puff it out into a full mesh. If you just apply this to a poly-line of edges you’ll get a square tunnel following them. (By the way, [A]-c will help you convert a Bezier path to some geometry.) Mostly this seems good for getting some rough stick figures and then getting some rough "clay" on them for further sculpting. Note that you can have it leave behind the stick figure’s sticks as proper Blender armatures.

Triangulate

In computer science there are only triangles but Blender is strangely shy about letting that be known. If you like triangles you can divide meshes into triangles with the triangulate modifier. This modifier works well and has several fancy fine controls. Remember when dealing with modifiers, you may need to apply this in object mode, but the results won’t be interesting until you’re in edit mode.

Another way to do this without modifiers is Mesh → Faces → Triangluate Faces or [C]-T. Here’s a Python command line for the same thing.

bpy.ops.mesh.quads_convert_to_tris(quad_method='BEAUTY', ngon_method='BEAUTY')

Another way which is wasteful but aesthetically balanced is to "poke". This puts a vertex in the center of a polygon and triangulates radially from it. This is also in Mesh -> Faces -> Poke Faces or [A]-P.

Solidify

This takes a two dimensional zero volume shell and gives it some thickness. It creates an inside and an outside. The exception is if you solidify a 1d thing with no area (a circle or line). Then you’ll get a thicker circle or line. The "Fill Rim" option makes sure the inside is completely enclosed; without it, you’ll get two disconnected shells, an inside one and the original outside mesh.

Wireframe

This takes a mesh, actually, probably only faces, and replaces the edges (and face) with a thin but solid shape. This makes the edges into more substantial geometry. You can also leave the faces by leaving "Replace Original" unchecked. I feel like you can’t do much with this to have custom wire profiles, but if you just want a simple lattice made from mesh quads or triangles, this can quickly make some striking geometry. Good, for example, for making an ornate lattice partition or lampshade. This could have very cool shadow effects.

Lamps

  • Point - Omnidirectional point (e.g. normal light bulb)

  • Spot - Directional point (e.g. theatrical spotlight)

  • Area - Light producing area (e.g. window, TV)

  • Hemi - Soft distant light (e.g. cloudy sky)

  • Sun - distant directional light (e.g. sunlight)

Diffuse is when light scatters as on a rough surface. Specular is where the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection.

Addons

Add Curve: Extra Objects

I guess I wasn’t the only one marveling at the oversight of not being able to add a simple point. Or a line. Well, now you can! No more needing to collapse a cube — something I’m all too good at.

TinyCAD

mesh_tinyCAD comes ready to go. Just turn it on in addon preferences.

Find mesh_tinyCAD features by right clicking into the context menu in edit mode; it will be at the top.

Here are things it claims to do, all of which are sensible.

  • VTX - Identify intersections from crossing edges (X shape), or edges that would cross if one (T shape) or both (V shape) were projected.

  • V2X - Similar to the case with V shapes this puts a vertex at the projected intersection but leaves the original lines alone.

  • XALL - Add intersection points like the X shape but on a collection of crossing edges.

  • E2F - Extend an edge until it hits a face at what my system’s terminology called the pierce point. A good way to execute this is to select the face in face select mode, then change to edge mode, get the edge, then apply. So 3, pick face, 2, [S]+pick edge, RMB, choose E2F from mesh_tinyCAD menu.

  • BIX - For two non-parallel edges, bisects their angle and creates usable guide geometry (not part of original) representing that bisector. Note that if the lines are intersecting, it will double up the angle vertex.

  • CCEN - Construct a circle from any 3 points. Note that the 3 points may easily find themselves doubled up. Note that the 3d cursor will move to the circles center point which is extremely useful for reusing it as a datum once the circle object has degenerated into just an arbitrary, if circular, mesh. This can possibly help when looking for quadrant points for a degenerate "circle". Try creating the circle with 4 faces. Then the only problem is how to align this square with the axes. I haven’t figured it out, but there must be a way. Check out Align Rotation To Vector; don’t know if that helps, but interesting.

BlenderGIS Addon

Here’s an amazing resource that allows GIS data to be handled smoothly in Blender. If it’s working properly, it seems to be able to construct topo maps from nothing and populate them with simple building models. It looks so amazing that I am still interested even though it’s a struggle to install and get working.

Here’s a nice demo of it in action. Here’s how to install.

These modules are needed.

apt install python-gdal python3-gdal libgdal-dev gdal-data gdal-bin
apt install python-pyproj python3-pyproj

But wait! Remember that Blender has its own Python. So this apt install is nice, but doesn’t help.

BAD=~/.config/blender/2.92/scripts/addons/ # Blender Addon Directory
cd $BAD && git clone https://github.com/domlysz/BlenderGIS

Maybe restart Blender to be safe.

Go to Edit → Preferences → Addons and find BlenderGIS and enable it. Note the little triangle hinting that there are tons of settings you can play with to set up the behavior of the addon.

There is now a GIS panel in the 3d view properties menu. You should also have a GIS menu with "View Select Add Object" etc. Under that GIS menu, select "Web Geodata → Basemap"… I’m following these directions and… Well, dang.

Still, this looks very cool and worth keeping an eye on.

Drawing Tools

Note that there is a pre-set layout called "2D Animation" but its tab is not out by default. Click the + on the layouts bar to find it. It’s not required, but good to remember that it’s there.

Annotations

Annotations are ways to scribble notes and other things onto your model. It can be used for other things but if you need anything too fancy, look to the grease pencil.

The annotation tool can be selected with the icon on the left vertical ("t") menu. Start scribbling. One way to control what you’ve scribbled is to look at the "Tools" tab on the right ("n") menu. There you can name your annotation. You can change its color. And you can change the behavior of how your new annotations. The very useful one is "Surface" "Placement". This will allow you to scribble on the face of some geometry, flat or complicated.

Grease Pencil

The grease pencil is a way to do fancy 2d animation based on a 3d model or in a 3d environment. Or not — these tools are powerful even if you don’t need 3d support. The intent, I believe, is to get a 2d drawn animation from a 3d modeled environment. This includes characters and rigging. All of it can be animated.

To get started, you must add a grease pencil object in a normal 3d editing situation. Once you put that in your scene, you can change the mode to "Draw" and start playing around.

Note that you will not see the proper line thickness or color if you are in wireframe view mode — try solid.

Textures And Materials

Applying Multiple Materials To Parts Of An Object

This is easy unless you forget the weird process. Which I have done.

The trick is to focus on the "Active Material Index" (tool tips will say that when you’re over it). This is at the very top of the material tab accessible with the pink checkered ball icon. This is not the "Browse Material To Be Linked" box with its own white checkered ball icon. No, you need the top one. You must add all new textures you plan to use on an object here. Click the + to do this. It is in the far upper right of the tab just under the pin.

When you have the multiple materials ready there, you can select faces you want to apply a texture to, then highlight the correct texture in the index, and then hit the Assign button.

Object Appearance During Editing

There are many helpful modes in Blender to control how stuff looks but they can be hard to find.

  • Permanent wireframe - If you want an object to always show its wireframe outline, maybe only that, no matter what mode is selected, try: Object Properties → Viewport Display → Wireframe It can be very helpful when trying to carve something up with the boolean modifiers to make the cutting tool easy to see through.

  • Want objects to be colored randomly so they’re easier to distinguish? Try z,6 to get solid mode. Then look for the "Viewport Shading" option pull down — a V icon near the render mode ball icons in the top right. The Color → Random.

  • Put a texture on something without running the full render? You can do the same as Random, but choose "Texture". This is slightly different than z,2 "Material Preview" mode. Both are lightweight and helpful.

Remeshing While Preserving Texture

Imagine you just did a photogrammetry extravaganza and you have a model with a zillion polys. Everything looks good but you’d like to economize that mesh a bit. But you don’t want to lose the detailed texture that the process managed to pick up. The general procedure is described in this video.

The first thing to do is duplicate the heavy model. Rename one "Thing_ORIGINAL" or something like that and the other "Thing". You’re eventually going to get rid of Thing_ORIGINAL but hide it for now. With Thing selected look for the Object Data Properties tab and in that look for Remesh. I used Voxel and a "Voxel Size" of 2.5mm. and an Adaptivity of 250mm. I had Fix Poles, Preserve Volume, Preserve Paint Mask checked. Click the Voxel Remesh and come back when it’s done. Inspect that and if it’s not quite satisfactory, try some different settings. The Quad remesh is also interesting and tries harder to have lined up neat quad faces but it’s less sensible about adhering to certain kinds of complex geometry. There is also a Remesh Modifier that can probably do this too. I almost feel like that’s faster since you can check what the settings will do quicker.

Great, the mesh is the way you like it, but the texture is lost. Basically you need to bake a texture rendered from your original to the new UV map for the new mesh. The first thing to do is make sure "Thing" has no texture. It may be pointing to an old image for the original and that will be comically wrong. Bring up the UV Editing workflow tab and create a new bitmap in the image viewer. Change the size to 2048x2048 or whatever you think is necessary. Then with Thing selected and in Edit mode, use u to bring up the UV Mapping menu and choose Smart UV Project. Hopefully you see the new mesh’s UV map somewhat sensibly laid out on the new blank image that Thing’s material refers to. Once you get there, it’s time to project.

With both of the Thing objects visible (though it probably doesn’t matter), you need to select both of them such that the new Thing is the bright orange and the old thing is the dark orange. I found that means select Thing and then Thing_ORIGINAL even though other selection processes in Blender seem to do it differently. Next go to the Render Properties tab and make sure you choose Cycles for the Render Engine. This is temporarily required to do this process and will present a Bake subsection. The Bake Type is Diffuse since you’re really trying to capture the actual light bouncing off this thing which includes its color. Under Contributions make sure only Color is checked. Now make sure Selected to Active is checked and since you were careful with the selection order, this should be ready. I left Cage unchecked and made an Extrusion length of 10mm. The Max Ray Distance was ok at 0. Now click the Bake button and take a break while that completes. If all goes well, you should have new pixels on your texture image that neatly paint the new mesh.

Delete the original and the original meshes if you like. Probably smart to save or embed the new texture bitmap.

Maps Related To Appearance

Color Maps

This is the most basic idea of rendering a surface based on information in a map. The map in this case is basically just an image or photograph which gets applied to the surface. It’s pretty simple and pretty effective and the first place to start.

An "albedo map" is very similar to an ordinary color map except that all the shadows and highlights have been removed. This allows your rendering engine to create more details accurate to the scene instead of a part of the texture collection process. It can be used where a "diffuse" input is needed.

Plug an albedo or color map (in that order of preference) into the Principled BSDF "Base Color" property.

Environment Maps

For specific implementation details on how see here.

Also known as reflection mapping. This is especially important if you are not staging shots entirely enclosed within a full model of a room or cave or similar. If, for example, you have a model of a car outdoors, some light rays (from the sun or street lights or other cars' lights) will bounce off the car’s reflective surfaces and head out in the direction of the infinite cosmos. An environment map answers the question of how to render that ray on the reflected surface.

These are often high dynamic range images [HDRI] scenes stitched together from multiple source images to map to a cube. In games this cube is generally called a skybox.

Procedural "Mapping"

If you use an image (i.e. a 2d array of values) to play texture tricks at render time, it can be properly thought of as mapping each pixel value to properties intended for a region of the geometry. However, if using procedural texturing tricks, the precision is arbitrarily calculable. Consider using a Minecraft texture to render a cube; if you zoom into a 1/32nd of the cube that region will be homogeneous. However, if you use a procedural approach with sin(X), then no matter how much you zoom in, there will always be subtle differences at least mathematically. This is why procedural approaches may not technically be "mapping" per se.

Bump Maps

Broadly speaking, the official definition is a texture mapping technique that simulates bumps. So this actually includes normal maps. Often it is used to refer to single channel maps.

Height Maps

Wikipedia seems to think that black (#00000) is typically the lowest value and white (#ffffff) the highest, which makes sense if you imagine a "floor" being zero. It is conceptually possible to use the extra channels of a color image to get a finer level of displacement if 256 levels are not enough.

Displacement Maps

The concept here is that this kind of map is used to actually modify geometry to create more complex geometry. In other words, this is not an illusion to jazz up simple geometry; it is a way to create proper complex geometry. A good example is taking a topo map and making real terrain. You really want the real terrain modeled but the information about how it is shaped is in a 2d format. If you’re going to look at the texture from the side and its actual geometry will need to interact properly with the background (e.g. you’re on the ground looking for the sunset between peaks in a mountain range) this kind of map is useful.

Displacement maps can be helpful if your target surface is so rough and chunky that you really need that extra geometry to be there casting shadows or defining tangential silhouettes. For example if you have a round castle turret composed of big rough stones, a displacement map might be needed to keep the whole thing from looking like a cleverly painted cylinder. Another example is rock strewn landscapes.

Normal Maps

The idea with normal maps is the direction a light ray reflects off a complex surface is carefully captured at asset creation time so that it can be more efficiently deployed at render time. Instead of having to investigate underlying geometry to calculate how light hitting a particular point would reflect, the rendering engine can just look it up on a map that explicitly contains that information. This also allows geometry with relatively few polygons to show smooth surface details as if it were more finely modeled. Normal mapping is used heavily by AAA game assets.

Normal maps are full three channel color images with each color being one of the normal vector’s component values. You can imagine a grid of unit vectors all pointing various directions; it turns out that a perfectly reasonable way to encode, manipulate, and store exactly that kind of information is simply in a familiar color image format. A purple color (no green component) tends to represent areas that are parallel with the original underlying flat surface.

Normal maps are useful to get subtle bevels and less sharp edges since the normal vectors provide more information about how the surface transitions from one region to the next.

Surfaces rendered with normal maps suffer from not having the full range of realistic dynamic lighting effects. They also look flat when viewed obliquely — the more perpendicular the view, the better the normal map illusion. They also do not cast shadows like proper geometry would. Omissions like this can cause normal maps to suffer an illusion where the texture’s concavity or convexity is ambiguous without supporting context.

To use a normal map, plug an image node of the normal map into the "Color" of a "Normal Map" node. Then run the "Normal" vector from that to the "Normal" vector of the Principled BSDF node. Make sure to set the "Image Texture" node’s "Color Space" property to "Non-Color Data".

Ambient Occlusion And Cavity Maps

Blender has a shader node called "Ambient Occlusion" in the "Input" category. What this means is that some parts of the scene tend to shade other parts somewhat even when still visible. Wikipedia has a nice example of a grid of cubes separated by some distance like buildings on a street plan. The sides of the buildings will be darker than the tops even though everything is visible and exposed to the same light and possibly even at the same angles. This helps create proper dark shadows down where the buildings meet the street that otherwise would have no reason to have its brightness fall off.

It looks to me to be very roughly analogous to highlights, but in the opposite direction — lowlights. It makes clear the special places on a model where light can not bounce around as freely.

Normally this is procedurally computed at render time but it probably can be baked into a map too.

Cavity maps are a very similar idea and are mostly used to represent where dirt would likely build up in a model. Blender even has some specific magic tricks for this. Under the Texture Paint workspace select the Vertex Paint interaction mode. Then find the Paint button and look for Dirty Vertex Colors. This should create a vertex map of cracks and places dirt would likely accumulate. I did exactly this with a Suzanne head and a default Blender scene and it worked pretty well. More details on this technique are described in this video.

Reflection Maps

This hints at where reflections are strongest. Note that in Physically Based Rendering (PBR) engines, this map is superfluous and ignored because that is precisely what the engine calculates. But maybe more important for pre-baked game assets and specialty rendering situations.

Roughness And Gloss Maps

A roughness map is used to help the rendering engine know where light cleanly bounces off and where it might get some random bounce angles. This could be used, for example, if you have a polished surface (low roughness) that has a scuffed or sandblasted section (higher roughness).

The roughness map can be plugged into the "Roughness" property of the Principled BSDF shader node. Make sure to set the "Image Texture" node’s "Color Space" property to "Non-Color Data".

Gloss is essentially the same as roughness, but inverted.

There is a related map for "metalness" that defines where a surface is metallic and where it is not. This can be useful for a rusty metal texture where the rusty parts are not behaving optically like "metal" but some of the shiny parts are. Another good example would be a circuit board where most of it is not metal, but the leads can be highlighted as metal. This kind of map can plug into the "Metallic" property of a Cycles' Principled BSDF node.

Some new systems (Unreal 4 apparently) have a provision for "fuzz maps" which help define where cloth and fibers are fuzzy.

Opacity Or Transparency Map

You can have a map showing where your surface is transparent, basically mapping the amount of light that can get through. This can be handy for a car sun roof or other kind of window. Maybe a lattice. Maybe dirt on glass, etc.

To use this kind of setup, plug your opacity map into the "Factor" of a Mix Shader Node. The bottom "Shader" property of the "Mix Shader" can connect to the Principled BSDF result of your render (i.e. adding transparency is done at the end of the pipeline). The top "Shader" is hooked up to a "Transparent BSDF" shader node. The output of the "Mix Shader" node’s "Shader" can go to the "Material Output" node’s "Surface". Or… that technique may be needlessly complex and obsolete. You can also try taking the Image node "Color" of an opacity map and plugging it to the shader’s "Alpha" property.

UV Map

A lot of resources help you make a UV map from geometry so you can go paint it in Gimp. But my problem is usually trying to wrap a known image onto my geometry in a way that seems sensible. For example, if I have an image of some tiles on a floor and I want to apply them so they’re roughly like they are on the floor, how does one adjust the UV map?

Tips:

  • I generally split the screen so that one of my windows can be the UV Editor.

  • The (vector) geometry in the UV Editor comes from the selected object, but only when in edit mode. So make sure you have an edit mode active and the geometry you want to unwrap selected.

  • Sometimes you have a long rectangle that is wrong. Don’t be fooled by how the UV editor unwraps it by default. Sometimes you have to turn it 90, maybe even in a direction that looks wrong to the scene. Remember that the 2d unwrapping is a very different thing than the 3d model.

Camera Tracking And Projection Painting

This video introduces camera tracking which seems to be a kind of photogrammetry with more hand work. You help Blender identify some tracking points in various frames and a camera solver can reconstruct where the camera must have been and what its parameters (error, lens, etc) were. This allows you to do amazing things with the 2d image that combines elements of a 3d model.

Here is part 2 which shows how a random scene with naturalistic trackers can be tracked and an objected added. Part 3 is very long but comprehensive. And part 4 has examples explained more thoroughly.

This video shows how to remap textures from a 2d photo into a clean perpendicular view, including unwrapping cylindrical objects like tree bark.

Here’s another one showing panorama stitching up to the level of spherical environment maps.

Part 3 in the series shows how to do projection painting to remove an object from a video. Pretty amazing.

Same guy doing an amazing job of facial motion capture in Blender. This seems to have implications for other 3d reconstruction tasks.

Here is another guy using this to project something onto a monitor (plane tracking).

Tips: It seems like all of these techniques really get better results from changing Render Properties → Color Management → View Transform → "Filmic" to "Standard".

Here’s another very competent guy doing a full end to end demonstration of putting a face mask on footage of a live action actor. Amazing. A great inspiration on what this can accomplish with many great workflow tips.

Procedure

  • Render Settings → Color Management → View Transform → Default. Do not use "Filmic". This is widely reported to be important for success.

  • Convert source footage to individual still frames. A JPEG sequence with 100% quality seems fine. If still production seems glitchy see remedy here.

  • Most of this tracking stuff is done in the Movie Clip Editor ([S]-F2). Choose 30fps because since we now have stills, it doesn’t matter.

  • "Set Scene Frames" to match project length (number of stills). About 200 seems like both a sufficient and tractable quantity.

  • "Prefetch" loads the entire sequence into memory to avoid delays and playback stuttering.

  • Render Settings → Color Management → View Transform → Default. That’s right, double check this. Apparently it is quite important.

  • In the Tracking Settings (in the left menus) check Normalize.

  • Set Correlation to .9. I.e. continue tracking attempt if it’s 90% confident it hasn’t lost it. Go quality or go home!

  • Normalize in the Tracking Settings can be useful to make the tracker invariant to some lighting changes.

  • Drop a tracker with [C]-LMB. Unhide its search area with [A]-s.

  • There’s also the "Track → Marker → Detect Features" button which can do a bunch of this tracker assignment automatically. It can even stay within an annotated region (get one with [A]-d and draw a boundary) by choosing the correct "Placement" option in the "Detect Features" properties that shows up in the lower left (F9 position). The more trackers the merrier, but 8 is the minimum for a full solve.

  • In the track window if some particular color channel is messy you can disable it to only focus tracking on the clearer channels.

  • [A]-rightarrow tracks forward to the next frame. Maybe [C]-t tracks forward? [C]-l locks all trackers after the tracking?

  • Save to no lose tracking progress during intensive solving calculations and playback, etc.

  • You can go to the "Graph" view which is in the pulldown that probably has "Clip" slected — between the "Tracking" and "View" items on the second row of menu cruft. Once in graph mode, you can look for trackers that don’t quite seem to know WTF is going on. It may be smart to use "x" to delete the ones that don’t synchronize with the consensus. If you’re very low on tracking points, you can maybe unlock the ones that are bad and manually sort out the problem spots.

  • Under Plane Track in the left menu, you can choose "Create Plane Track". Then you can drag its corners to four trackers that are defining some kind of plane, perhaps the ground or a screen, and that should be a helpful reference.

  • The Keyframe A and Keyframe B settings should be two positions where the parallax can best inform the algorithm of the orientation change. These are used to calculate the initial model and are propagated to the other frames so it’s good to have the biggest difference in pose between these.

  • With 4 trackers you can make a plane. If you’re a bad ass you can project that plane with more tracking features but the normal way is to collect at least 8 trackers from the original footage. Once you have that you can try the Solve Camera Motion. This basically tries to look at all the points you’ve identified in a lot of changing 2d frames and calculate (solve) where the camera must have been (and been pointing) to achieve that result. The "Solve error: 0.8637" at the top right is how well it did. An error of 0 is perfect (and generally unattainable in the real world). .3 is very good, .7 maybe useable, 1 and above is janky, and more than about 3 is probably unusable. I get the feeling that this error value is measured in pixels — I don’t know exactly how, except for object solving. For object solving using a stationary camera on a tripod, the tolerable error can be a little higher, maybe 1 pixel.

  • For general solving you might want to change the "Refine" setting in the "Solve" panel from "Nothing" to "Focal length, K1, K2"

  • To view the results, get a 3d viewer window and then back in the Solve panel click "Setup Tracking Scene". At first it will be muddled looking. Select 3 trackers and under "Orientation" choose "Floor". This will align those three markers to the floor plane. This should help everything get sensibly oriented. You can also choose 2 trackers whose distance apart is known or guessable and enter the known distance and pick "Set Scale". You can also pick your favorite tracker and use "Set Origin" to do that. Then choose a tracker to the "right" and choose "Set X Axis".

  • You can also go into camera view in the 3d viewer. With the camera selected go to "Camera Properties → Background Images → Add Image → Background Source → Movie Clip → Active Clip" (yes, even if you’re using stills.

Rendering

Background

Fancy people setup every part of their virtual universe but I’m often just trying to show off some single artifact I’ve been working on. The default dark gray background that shows up on renders is often at odds with dark items. To change the way the rendered background looks when it is empty, go to "Properties → World Properties → Surface → Surface" and set that to "Background". Now you can change the color and "strength" of the background. Note this does not do anything to make wireframe or solid view look any different.

Apparently to change the background of the 3d Viewport for wireframe and solid mode, you can go to Edit → Preferences → Themes → 3D Viewport

The color of the grid lines can be changed here. But keep scrolling down… farther… keep going… almost there… until you get to an entire section questionably called Gradient Colors. In there you will find Theme Background Color which has options. By default the eponymous "gradient" is turned off, but turning it on can be a festive thing to do. In this context, I get the feeling that "low" means the bottom of the screen, not a color property; high is the top.

Noise

One of the most frustrating things about trying to get high-quality realistic rendering is noise artifacts. This manifests as a sparse field of bright pixels where that is not accurate. Here are some places to start when trying to figure out how to minimize this problem.

  • The new blender.org videos are fantastic and this video explains all you need to know in about 3.5 minutes. Start here.

  • Blender doc about dealing with noise.

  • Excellent discussion of noise and how it can be tamed using Cycles.

Exporting To Unity

I think this process has been streamlined with some necessary transformations automatically sorted out. Now just doing the export step works.

  • File → Export → FBX → Write a FBX file

When imported into Unity, it opens and looks right in the scene. Here are how the axes are adjusted.

Blender

Unity

Direction

+Z

+Y

Up

-Y

+Z

Forward

-X

+X

Starboard

The location of the imported asset seems correct when placed exactly by setting the Transform Position attributes in Unity.

It may be wise to set the units in Blender to match what you’re trying to achieve in Unity.

Hmm. Yes, there still are problems. The two clues that things didn’t work quite right are that in the icon of the model asset, it is pointing up. When it’s placed in the scene it seems correct, but that icon is not consistent. And the position is just a little bit off by a weird amount.

This video is quite specific about what the problems are and what you can do to minimize Blender/Unity conversion problems.

I did the easy first method of clicking the "Experimental transforms" box during the FBX export. That seemed to cure problems.

Partially

Use [C]-b to select a box to render. This puts the powerful and resource hungry rendering engine to work only in this region of interest.

To clear this rendering ROI box [C]-[A]-b. This is important if the ROI box was done in the camera because that is how the final animation will be done.

In the Sampling section of the Render properties, the Samples box contains two fields, "Render:" and "Preview:". The Preview one is for what is rendered in the preview box set with [C]-b. This can be very helpful to determine the level necessary for a more complete render.

Camera Positioning

If you really have your act together, you can be very explicit of course, but I often need to move around looking at the scene as the camera will see it. To do this easily, use 0 to get to the camera view. Then go to View → Navigation → Walk Navigation. Now you can use WASD to pan around (also E for up and Q for down) and the mouse to aim the camera. Once you think it’s a decent shot, press F12 to render it.

Camera View Properties

Although it is a somewhat exotic application, one thing Blender can do really well is show you roughly what some real cameras would have in frame by matching those cameras in the model and rendering. The render is exactly the same (or trying to be) as what a real digital camera of the same resolution is seeing. The trick then is how to match your Blender virtual cameras to the exact specifications of your real ones. This Q&A addresses the issue. The basic strategy is to go to the (SLR-looking camera) Render icon and go to Dimensions and set the pixels there. That sets the aspect ratio. Then go to the (Movie camera) Data icon and look for "Field of View". This field of view angle seems to apply to the axis with the largest number of pixels and the other axis is scaled appropriately. This means a 1000x2000 render with a 90 degree FoV will have that 90 degrees in the vertical orientation.

Freestyle

Freestyle rendering mode is a way to achieve interesting non-photorealistic effects in final renders.

One problem I had was where I had a very simple blocky shape with simple 90 degree angles and on a couple of the straight lines, there was a strange fluctuation of width. This made no sense, but I tracked it down to a particular setting. In the "Freestyle Line Style" section there is a property called "Chaining" which in theory can link geometry together. Turning this off cured the problem. I never figured out what it was trying to chain or how since the defective features were single edges with no complexity whatsoever.

Performance

Also note that you can change the level of detail of the rendering to speed up test renders. To find this go to the "Properties" bar; choose the "Render" button which looks like a camera; look for the "Sampling" section which is between "Freestyle" and "Geometry"; in this section look for the "Samples:" fields; specifically look for the "Render:" field. A value of perhaps 1024 is pretty decent and takes a while and a value of 32 or 64 can make things go quickly for previews. I don’t know exactly why sometimes this Sampling section is absent but this seems to be the important thing to adjust for grainy quality problems.

If you have access to a fancy GPU, rendering might be faster. But it might not. This is not a slam dunk in the Blender world like in other applications. If using a GPU consider adjusting the values in "Render→Performance→Tiles→Center→(X,Y)" to something larger than the normal "16" that seems pretty decent for CPU rendering. Note that if you do have a fancy GPU that is competitive or superior, you can run two instances of Blender, one rendering with the CPU and another with the GPU. I can’t easily think of a better way to punish a computer’s entire capability!

Single Image

Sometimes you don’t need a video and you just want a still render of your scene. Go to the UV/Image Editor window type at the bottom of the rendered image. Got to Image and then Save As Image. Also F3 works.

Note that default Blender 2.8+ seems to want to open a completely new window when asked to render. This can be fixed in the preferences. Look for this.

Interface → Temporary Windows → Render In → Image Editor

To Images

It often makes a lot of sense not to render to a full video file. If you have hundreds of frames and Blender crashes at frame 300, if you’re rendering directly to a video file, you’ll need to solve the problem and start from the beginning. Rendering to images, therefore, usually makes a lot more sense. This also allows you to distribute the load of rendering between many different computers.

The important trick is how to assemble the still frames into the final video file that you want. You can use another tool like this.

avconv -i %04d.png -r 24  -qscale:v 2 xedlamp.mp4

This will take everything named something like 0003.png and create the video file. Also explore ffmpeg if that’s currently in vogue on your system (see my video notes for annoying details).

Here’s another trick to get an animated gif.

convert -delay .033 -loop 0 lamp*.png xedlamp.gif

Or here are some fancy ImageMagick options.

convert -quality 5 -dither none -matte -depth 8 -deconstruct \
-layers optimizePlus -colors 32 -geometry 400x -delay 2 -loop 0 \
frame*.png a.gif

Note especially -delay 2 which seems to be the minimum value. Anything less will make, strangely, add much more delay ref. Also note that if there are errors, the optimizer might need more room. See this.

You can also use the Blender video editor and "Add" "Image", select all the images and eventually export it when you’re happy. See video editing below.

Making Animated Gifs

I think it’s a weird omission that Blender doesn’t have a native backend (that I know about) for animated gifs. But that’s fine. In this rare instance of Blender being frugal with features, there are plenty of ways to do the job.

First decide if you want a transparent background. This isn’t about gifs per se, but it tends to be a popular idea with gifs. Go to Render Properties (the camera tab) and look for the Film section. There should be a simple toggle for Transparent. Now back to Output Properties (the printer tab) make sure Color has RGBA if you’re going for transparent. Or not if not.

Set your Resolution X and Y as normal and pick File Format as PNG. Make sure you have your directory path (top of Output section of Output Properties) set to something sensible; I like /tmp/R/ for "render". Now Render → Render Animation from the top bar menu ([C]-F12, and remember you must use a real Ctrl key, not a remapped one).

Now you have a collection of PNG frames in /tmp/R/. How do you convert those to an animated gif? The most scriptable technique is to use gifsicle. Unfortunately, this program only assembles gifs from gifs. So you’ll need a process like this.

#!/bin/bash
# Start with a directory of still PNG frames as supplied by Blender.
# End with an animated GIF.
# You might need: sudo apt install gifsicle gifview imagemagick
P=/tmp/R           # Make sure this path matches your output directory.
O=/tmp/myanim.gif  # Set this to whatever you want or rename later.
cd $P
echo "== Converting Input PNGs..."
for F in *png; do echo "$P/$F -> $P/${F%%png}GIF" ; convert $F ${F%%png}GIF; done
echo "== Composing Animated GIF..."
gifsicle -O2 --delay 5 --disposal previous --loopcount 0*GIF > $O
echo "== Inspecting..."
stat $O && identify $O | head -n1 # Show useful size info to confirm success.
gifview -a $O            # Check the work. "q" to quit.
echo "== Clean Up..."
read -p "[C]-c to keep stills, Enter to delete them."
rm -v *GIF *png    # If you're confident you didn't need the stills.

Note that gifsicle is a weird program with weird options. The delay seems to be in 1/10 seconds (so 50ms shown here). The disposal method may not be needed if you do not need transparent background. The output file is only found on standard output, so redirection is necessary.

Remotely

One obvious example for normal people is letting AWS do the heavy lifting for you. This way you can optimize the type of engine you use (GPU or CPU) for your project and get all of that heat out of your house. Step one is to set everything up exactly like it needs to be in your Blender project. Make sure that if you were using a GUI session you could just open the project and hit [F12] (Render Image) and everything would work perfectly. If that’s the case, log into your remote Linux system.

Rsync your project to the remote system. Run the render with something like this.

blender -b chessScene.blend -o //chessScene -F PNG -f 1

This will produce a file chessScene0001.png with no GUI fuss.

To do a complete animation use -a for the whole thing or pick specific frames with -f 1..20 or something like that.

blender -b lamp.blend -o //lampoutput -F PNG -a

The // syntax indicates relative paths from the blend file. You can also include explicit padded frame numbers with #, one per digit. For example test-##.png becomes test-000001.png. Sometimes you might want to just dump them to somewhere in temp. I don’t know if this is overriding the Render Properties but it might be. Seems you don’t need a -o if you’re happy with what’s specified in the .blend file.

Of course one problem with this strategy is that you can send up some geometry that is pretty lean and render it into lavish high frame rate bit maps; this can blow up the size considerably. So just think about that with respect to any transfer/storage fees that might exist. If you just happen to have access to an awesome private GPU machine, go for it!

Here’s a little script I wrote to help get a quick preview of full renders without doing all the frames. Lots of good information contained in here and will be a useful template for remote operation and custom project build scripts.

#!/bin/bash
# =========== Settings  ===========
# The Blend project to render.
FILE=./DYNAMIC-xed.blend

# Directory where rendered frames should go.
# This will be created if you forget to.
T=/tmp/renderQC

# Starting frame - ignore frames before this.
# Hand enters near 70. Ball drops around 113.
S=70

# Ending frame - do not render any frames after this.
# Ball exits at 335.
E=336

# Skip value - for test renders skip frames (e.g. odd ones, every
# 5th, every 15th, etc.). Let's you see if there are any obvious
# problems before spending hours working on the whole thing on every
# frame.
SKIP=6

# =========== Program ===========
mkdir $T # Just in case it's not already there.

STIME=$(date "+%s") # Starting time in seconds.
# This is the short options way if you ever need to cut and paste it.
#-------------------------------
# blender -noaudio -y -b -o /tmp/renderQC/ -s ${S} -e ${E} -j ${SKIP} ./DYNAMIC-xed.blend
#-------------------------------

# Here is the same thing but with less cryptic long options.

blender \
    -noaudio \
    --background ${FILE} \
    --render-output /tmp/renderQC/ \
    --frame-start ${S} \
    --frame-end ${E} \
    --frame-jump ${SKIP} \
    --render-anim

# Or cherry pick specific frames you want.
    #--render-frame 70 \
    #--render-frame 71,73,75,77 \
    #--render-frame 100..120 \ # Including 100 and 120.

# This will try to wrap up the generated frames into a video file that
# can be played back smoothly. This requires every frame to be present
# or at least they must all be renamed to be sequential.
#ffmpeg -i "${T}/%04d.png" "${T}/video.mp4"
#echo "Hopefully a video was created called: ${T}/video.mp4"

# If you have a sampled non-continuous frames for a quick preveiw, you
# can make an animated gif out of them.
# Note this is smaller for quick preview purposes. Use the same
# command but with geometry set to something other than 500 pixels wide.
convert -delay 5x30 -geometry 500x -dispose Previous -layers Optimize ${T}/*.png -loop 0 ${T}/sequence.gif

echo "Hopefully a gif was created called: ${T}/sequence.gif"
echo "View with a browser, or:"
echo "   gifview -a ${T}/sequence.gif"

ls ${T}
echo "If you see a list of stills they, were in: ${T}"
ETIME=$(date "+%s") # Starting time in seconds.
DURATION=$(( ${ETIME} - ${STIME} ))
NUMOFPNGS=$(ls ${T}/*.png | wc -l)

echo "That whole operation took ${DURATION} seconds."
echo "And you now have ${NUMOFPNGS} PNGs"

I called that script Command Interface Lights Out Rendering or the easy to remember ciloren (pronounced "Kylo Ren").

Note that running blender remotely from the command line may cause trouble due to a lack of an X windows system (answering system calls?). This thread talks a lot about the issue of Unable to open a display. I was finally able to get things going by prefacing my blender command with a DISPLAY setting like this.

DISPLAY=:0 blender -noaudio -y -b -o /tmp/renderQC/ -s ${S} -e ${E} -j ${SKIP} myproject.blend

Open Shading Language

OSL is used by the Cycles render engine. Examples of it can be found in /usr/share/blender/scripts/templates_osl.

Rigging

Rigging Resources

I’m mostly interested in simple machine simulations. This should be easier than rigging a human ninja, but strangely it is not. Here’s a resource for "Animating Industrial Robots With Blender". WIP…

Here is an excellent simple tutorial rigging a simple robot arm. Here is a landing gear featuring pistons and hard pivot joints.

Here’s a good video showing the normal rigging of a normal biped figure.

This whole series, Humane Rigging is very well done. I watched it all just to marvel at the amazing complexity that high quality rigging seems to require. This video series was nice because it was not "easy" or for beginners — it told the mathematical truth to many of Blender’s weird decisions. Overall very helpful to understand things even if you’ll never rig and animate a battle between a robot squid and a Medusa.

Danpro has a nice vehicle rig series. I think if you watch these 10 times, the ideas will start to sink in a bit.

I think that in pose mode while rigging you can use these predictable short cuts to reset your rig back to the default pose.

Four Bar Linkages With Bones

A 4 bar linkage is a good test of Blender’s ability to do sensible things with complex assemblies. Here’s a description of a simple process for setting this up.

  • Create an armature object with two connected bones (generally extrude the second bone in edit mode). Call this armature A. Call the head (fat) end bone "Bar_4" and the tail end bone "Target". Bar_4 will be the handle that you position.

  • Create a second armature like the first ([S]-d duplication works). Call this armature B. Call its head end "Bar_2" and it’s tail end "Bar_3". These are the bars that will be calculated and not explicitly set.

  • Mentally note that "Bar 1" is simply the span between the head of Bar_4 and the head of Bar_2 since those heads do not ever move. To visualize a practical example, imagine that Bar_4 is the door which you want to control in your scene; Bar_2 and Bar_3 are the moving parts of the door closing mechanism; Bar_1 is simply the door frame between the wall mount for the closer rods and the door hinge.

  • Move the tail of Bar_3 so that it is in the same location as the tail of Bar_4 (which is also the head of Target).

  • Select armature B and go to Pose Mode.

  • Select Bar_3 and look for the "Bone Constraint Properties" tab. Click "Add Bone Constraint" and choose "Inverse Kinematics". Choose armature "A" for the Target. Choose A’s bone called "Target" for the "Bone".

  • It might be smart to add a chain length of 2 since that seems to be correct. However, I noticed that leaving it at zero also did actually work anyway for some reason.

  • You should now be able to rotate armature A’s Bar_4 bone and have Bar_2 and Bar_3 do the right thing ("bar 1" is implied as part of the stationary part of the model).

  • Since you’re not trying to animate bones as the final goal, you’ll want to hook the rig up to your actual model. Select the real/rendered object that represents one of the moving parts, one of your part’s bars in the linkage.

  • Shift select the armature. That will allow you to change to Pose Mode with some armature object also selected as the non-active selection.

  • Now that you’re in pose mode you can and must select the specific bone with a shift click. Once you have the specific bone as the active selection and its real world object also in the selection, parent with [C]-p. Choose "Bone" as the parenting style (Not "Bone Relative").

  • Pose Bar_4 and enjoy!

Rigify

Rigify is a 1st class addon present in stock Blender that seems to pre-emptively do a lot of typical rigging jobs so you can skip a lot of typical work. I found it interesting that you can add ([S]-a,a) a rig from bird, cat, horse, shark, wolf. I don’t know why those animals, but they could be helpful. There’s also a fancy human, basic human and basic quadruped to get you started.

When you add a meta rig but it is hidden inside the model, you can select the "metarig" object (that’s Rigify’s automatic name), go to the Object Data Properties (the little running stick figure icon), then open the Viewport Display section, and make sure "In Front" is selected. Since I like wire frame mode more than normal users this bothers me less than it seems to bother every single Rigify tutorial creator; yet even I can’t understand why this is not the default.

It seems like it is important to make sure that you clear any lingering transforms on the model you’re trying to rig and also the metarig which you may have just tweaked to match your model. It seems that it may be sufficient and but not necessary to make sure both are cleared (with [C]-a) but it does seem at least necessary to make sure they are not different.

The donkey work here is positioning the auto-generated metarig components (in Edit mode) inside your model’s exterior mesh. Here are some handy tips.

  • Hide bones you’re not using that are in the way with h. Unhide all the hiders with [A]-h.

  • To position an entire finger or other contiguous subsystem, don’t forget about selecting with l to get just linked things.

  • Consider X symmetry mirroring found on the far right of the top-most bar of the 3d Viewport editor.

If you use the meta rigs in a predictable way and keep them largely intact, instead of parenting the mesh to them as you do by hand, you can go to the armature properties and scroll down and find a "Generate Rig" button (must be in Object mode). This will let the Rigify addon really do a fancy job of rigging your model. Once the fancy rig is generated, you can parent the mesh to this fancy rig (use "with automatic weights"). In theory you should be able to (save a copy first and) delete the meta rig since its job is done; I found this helpful since otherwise it just sits there in the wrong position.

Once you have the Rigify controls everything should make perfect sense. Ha! Just kidding! It’s actually a bewildering jumble and what to do with the riot of crazy controls you now have is not at all clear. This video is quite lucid in deciphering the Rigify workflow after the rig is generated.

The red arrow controls seem to be the Inverse Kinematic (IK) controls. The idea is that you can put a hand or foot somewhere and the intermediate arm or leg joints go to a plausible position. This is complicated because there are many solutions to where the intermediate joints could be to achieve the effect. The green circle controls are the Forward Kinematic controls and they are more what you’d expect from a simple parenting relationship — move the upper arm and the lower arm and hand goes too. Move the lower arm and the hand goes, but not the upper arm. By default the IK controls are fully active and the FK controls are disabled. This can be fixed by playing with the slider labeled something like "IK-FK (hand.L)"; changing it from 0 to 1 makes IK inactive and FK becomes active. This can be very useful to initially pose your model so that major body positions are set up sensibly.

The red cogwheels seem to be some kind of container for properties and stuff like that. I do not believe you ever need to manipulate them or worry about them directly on the model.

The big box is the torso in its entirety. The yellow loopy things are the shoulders and hips.

Note that these colors are actually from something called "Bone Groups" found in the armature properties. You can make your own bone groups and give them custom colors. But at least you can go see what Rigify is thinking when it is color coding things.

One thing that can easily be problematic is that for IK pose controls, if you move the control beyond the length of the bone chain, the limb will stretch to make it work. This elongation is fine for Mrs. Incredible, but not useful for my projects. You can turn this off with the properties slider labeled "IK Stretch" which is present for IK elements (0 is don’t stretch, 1 is do what it takes).

When you do some zany IK motion the FK rig (e.g. green circles on the arm) may just float in some random non-posed way. The trick is to synchronize the two modes with the buttons labeled FK → IK and IK → FK. I had all kinds of problem accepting this notation into my heart because I thought that these were backwards to my way of thinking. I finally settled on the mnemonic that the operator in this case should be replaced with the phrase Defers To. Then it all makes sense.

The "Pole" stuff (as in "Toggle Pole") relates to a way to control IK bones with little balls that you move instead of rotating them.

"FK Limb Follow" on the torso basically decides if the extremities will have their angles locked to the torso or if they’ll try to remain in space like they are. This prevents counter-animating where you adjust the torso and now the arms are pointing in the wrong place and you have to reset the arms. Sometimes you want the arms to follow the torso, sometimes not. The "IK→FK (hand.L)" button basically resets the IK so that it’s not incompatible with that pose. So you can use FK to get things mostly in the right place, and then start using IK to make fine detailed moves, but when you switch to IK mode, it will bork into a weird position. This button just lets the system know that this pose is a good one.

Note that after using Rigify, when you open a saved blend file you may get a "security warning" related to the file rig_ui.py. This official documentation indicates that this is a legit thing and controls the fancy UI that goes with the fancy rig. Best to enable this and let the scripts run.

Another similar question is what are WGTS_Rig objects? And, can they be deleted. The answer to that can be found here yet, I couldn’t understand it. Let’s just say that it might be possible to delete this.

Rigify Process

Here’s the process I used to make a fully rigged human arm. Note that I didn’t want the whole body rig, just the arm (think of Thing in the Addams Family).

  1. Might be wise to first do a [S]-s 1 to get the 3d cursor at the origin. [S]-a → Armature, and insert full Human (metarig) object.

  2. Make damn sure everything is cleanly perfect with respect to transforms. Clear them all!

  3. Move the arm mesh to roughly match the meta rig pretty well. Scale your model (and clear it!) if needed — do not scale the metarig. Leave that pristine! So for example, if your arm had the shoulder at the origin, move it up to a metarig’s shoulder location. Clear that translation transform!

  4. With your model close to where the metarig is happiest, now adjust the metarig’s arm/finger bones to perfectly match the model. Try to keep all joints together that were together in the metarig.

  5. In Object mode with the metarig selected, hit the Generate Rig button in the armature’s Object Data Properties. Hopefully all the colorful controls of a fancy full human rig now show up.

  6. Delete the metarig — or move it 5m back out of the way, etc.

  7. Select your model first, and then the fancy rig object — in that order — and [C]-p to parent them with Set Parent To → Armature Deform → With Automatic Weights.

  8. Now it should all be good and working, but you have a bunch of other body parts with no real mesh on them. No problem. Just start selecting those in Edit mode — where they conveniently turn back into bone shapes for easy selecting — and get rid of them. I actually left the shoulder parented to the baseplate positioner. But I think there is some flexibility here and things will still pretty much work nicely.

Rigging Process

To do a simple rigging of a simple single object with a posable bone I’ll use the example of a rowing oar:

  • Starting in object mode, select the mesh of the oar.

  • Still in object mode, add and select the oar’s armature.

  • Line this new armature and its single bone up with the oar in the orthogonal position convenient for modeling. But the base (fat end) at the oarlock where the oar pivots.

  • Go to Pose Mode with [C]-tab and select the relevant specific oar bone in the armature (as opposed to the whole armature).

  • [C]-p to bring up the parenting menu - select "Bone".

  • Now, in Pose Mode, you can manipulate the oar bone and the oar mesh will follow.

  • Doing this will allow you to go crazy with waving the oar around for animating, but to resume work modeling the oar you can just go to Pose context menu → Clear User Transforms. Or you can use [A]-r and perhaps [A]-g to reset any rotations and translations (respectively) you may have introduced.

  • [A]-g - Remove bone movements.

  • [A]-r - Remove bone rotations.

  • [A]-s - Remove bone size changes.

2d Drawing With Grease Pencil

It might be helpful to recall what a "grease pencil" is in real life — they are (were?) weird pencil-like writing instruments that could write on difficult smooth surfaces. People used them to mark up things like glass (they seem to be called "china markers" today) and, if my recollection is not amiss, transparencies for overhead projectors which were basically PowerPoint machines before there was PowerPoint. They had a weird string which was used to "sharpen" them by tearing off layers of paper which composed their housing. I think these were traditionally used to mark up clear plastic animation frames (though I can not imagine them being used to execute the artwork). So the gist of the concept is that they write on smooth clear plastic and if you do a stack of such things just right, you’d have an animation. Again, it’s a bit odd to me to think of the grease pencil executing the artwork itself (it’s not permanent, smudges off, poor detail, etc.) but I think the much finer Blender tool evolved from a less fancy feature. I think of grease pencils as being a better skeuomorphic fit with Blender’s annotation tools (and I guess they’re kind of related).

This information was so useful, I’m going to reproduce it here.

Collections can contain grease pencil objects (fat squiggly snake icon). The grease pencil objects can contain a grease pencil data block (similar icon with endpoint vertex squares). The grease pencil data block generally contains layers, the basic two are by default called "Lines" and "Fills". Layers contain frames which are selected by the playhead placement. Frames are composed of the strokes and fills themselves which are composed of points (perhaps vertices).

The grease pencil data block tab — near the Materials thingy when a GP Object is active — allows you to add and remove layers if the ordinary "Lines" and "Fills" is not enough. I find that adding a GP Object with "Add → Grease Pencil → Stroke" starts you off with a quintessential stroke that is inevitably not what you really need; it seems quite ok to use "Blank".

If you’re not seeing the grease pencil strokes or they are faded out while you’re trying to create them there are many possible explanations.

  • Your reference image could be set "front" and not "back" obscuring your work, maybe by some background opacity.

  • In the grease pencil’s object data properties, there is a section called "Layers" with its own opacity setting that needs to be sufficiently visible.

  • Make sure you’re not on a neighboring frame with the onionskin effect on.

  • The "strength" of the stroke is a setting like brush size. It is found at the top of the screen near the brush radius in the interface while editing. A pressure sensitive tablet pen can change this fluidly but RMB while editing lets you set it explicitly.

Animation

Animation Controls Overview

The animation system in Blender has an easy mode that is deceptively easy. You can set auto keyframes and move a thing around and hit play and it’s good. But behind the scenes all kinds of crazy stuff is going on and any animation that gets even slightly complex will start to be very confusing very quickly.

For example, in the timeline, new keyframes often do not appear when you might expect them. The crazy thing is that you need to use MMB to pan the display down because the keyframes are there, just panned up above the title bar. Crazy! That is a broken system! But be aware.

This video is an excellent introduction to the true nature of Blender’s animation system beyond dumbed down clutching at keyframes.

There are many different editor panels which are used in controlling animation.

  • Timeline - Preview the animation, i.e. actually watch it and see it happen visually. This means scrubbing controls, etc. It also is where automatic keyframes are activated and controlled. Again, note that keyframes should show up here and they often down because they are scrolled up and off the display. It is also useful for setting the rendered animation frame limits, which if you think about it is all about previewing — in this case, the render.

  • Dope Sheet - Detailed display of the keyframe data itself. Note that very often you’ll get something like "Object Transformation" and that looks like it. But it is normal that this one line has a little triangle on the far left — a triangle that points right. If you click it, you open up this line and the triangle points down. Then you see a lot more explicit data about all the things. Basically don’t be shy about digging around the items displayed for deeper levels.

  • Action Editor - This is actually a subcategory of the Dope Sheet editor (see the "Mode" pull-down there). It tends to show less detailed information than the normal Dope Sheet which shows a full action hierarchy. The Action Editor shows this action. It does have more helpful controls for singling out a particular action however (Note the "Browse Action to be linked." pull-down confusingly shown with the same icon as the Dope Sheet editor itself.

  • Graph Editor - What the dope sheet is for keyframe numbers, the graph editor is for the transition data. If the dope sheet says property-A is 10 at time 0s and 20 at time 3s, the graph editor plots the transition. This can be a custom curve or any kind of mathematical thing.

  • Nonlinear Animation - This editor is for playing with actions in a way that’s similar to playing with video clips in the video editor. You can get an action into this editor with the "Push Down" button in the title bar of the Action Editor. Once in the NLA editor, you can move it around in time and stack it with other actions. Different actions can even be combined in interesting ways. For example, if you have the following two actions: a swimmer crossing a river and a swimmer being carried down river by the current, you might combine them to get the swimmer on the correct trajectory. To do this highlight the higher strip (which by default replaces lower ones) and change the "Blend" mode in the right panel which, like the main 3d editor, is made visible with "n". Another CGDive video which does an incredibly good job explaining this whole mess in perfect detail. Bravo!

Try this video too.

Actions

In Blender there is an important but somewhat advanced concept (not necessary to know about for simple cases) called "actions". An action is where keyframes are really stored. Just like objects contain mesh data, actions can be thought of objects that contain keyframe data. Actions also contain curves which specify how the keyframes make the transition. This makes actions a kind of container that contains all the data needed to animate something.

Actions can be linked to objects and the properties that the action changes over time with its keyframes and transition curves will animate that object. You can apply multiple objects to one action. This is the reference count number that shows up in places. If the reference count drops to zero because you’ve unlinked all objects from an action, it will disappear when the animation system recomputes. To prevent this and save an arbitrary action disassociated from any particular object, you can make it have a "fake" object. This is like "phony" in Make and just keeps it around and valid though it doesn’t really have a real object target (yet).

To create this reference to a fake object you can "Save" an action by clicking the shield icon in the Dope Sheet editor’s Action Editor mode. Similarly, the X there is to delete or, technically, unlink actions. This is also where you can create a new action to work with.

Timeline

  • [A]-a - Play animation or if in progress, stop animation.

  • [A]-[S]-A - Play animation in reverse.

Sometimes there is an unlabeled orange bar near the bottom - just below the marker labels if there are any. This is showing "the cache". This seems related to Scene Properties → Rigid Body World → Cache. It seems that this line indicates which frames the simulation system starts and stops which is defined globally only once in the Scene Properties section just mentioned. The simulation start and end frame setting seem quite important; if the system isn’t even trying to simulate physics in the frames you expect, then things won’t work.

If your system came from elsewhere but is not behaving how you expect when you modify it, look specifically there at the "Bake" and "Free Bake" (un-bake) setting.

There can be confusion in Physics Properties → Rigid Body → Settings with the "Dynamic" and "Animated" checkboxes. The tricky thing is that you may need to "animate" the "Animated" setting — this means that you’d want the rigid body physics to be active during some part of the shot but not the whole thing. The confusing part is that "Animated" can kind of mean "not animated" because it means you’re animating "by hand" and not letting the physics simulation take over. It’s confusing enough to put keyframes on these checkboxes but keep in mind that "the Animation System" as shown in the tool tip for "Animated" means the normal one where you do the animating with keyframes, not the physics simulation.

Keyframe

  • i - insert keyframes. This is important to get the yellow line key frames to show up. Use i again for the next place. Also to interpolate values of a miscellaneous blender variable, you can hover over any slider bar and press i. Note that when editing the objects' position, this is not automatically updated on the keyframe and will revert (unless auto record is on); just make sure to press i after every pose edit.

  • [A]-i - Delete keyframe. Put current timeline frame on the desired keyframe and put the cursor over the main 3d window.

When the value fields in the properties menu show up yellow that means they are showing the value of a selected keyframe. When they show up green, that is one of the frames which is being interpolated. (So it seems to me.)

The red record button on the tool bar is to do automatic keyframes. With this engaged, LocRotScale changes are automatically assigned to the current time location as a keyframe.

Dope Sheet

To move all of the animations such that the effect is inserting more frames in the animation, you can go to the dope sheet and press a to select everything. Then press "g20" to move everything 20 frames forward.

Rigid Body Animation

The rigid body animation can position an object based on physics, stuff like falling and bouncing off things. The biggest point of confusion I had was on the "Animated" property. This property itself can be keyframed (animating the animating) and doing this is how you activate the computed physics action. What I found confusing was when you want the object to do animated stuff on its own, you must turn off "Animated". Then the RB physics can take over. N.b. that "Animated" means: you, the Blender user, will be animating this by hand - not the rigid body physics system.

Here’s the tool tip on the Animated property: "Allow rigid body to be controlled by the animation system." Since this is found on the Physics Properties → Rigid Body → Settings panel, you think it means the rigid body animation system. No - the opposite. It means the normal manually specified key frame animation system. So that’s quite confusing IMO.

Reference Images

When doing hand-drawn 2d animation it is very helpful (and not at all cheating!) to have some live action video of such action to use as a reference. In the outliner, select the camera and then in the properties panel (where materials and modifiers live) look for the camera settings. There you will find a section for "Background Images" which works as expected. You can even bring in video clips.

I found it helpful to use youtube-dl to bring in the video and then use something like this to remove the audio and crop it down.

ffmpeg -i YouTubeJumper.mkv -ss 00:01:34 -t 00:00:03 -vf "crop=950:550:400:350" -an jumpaction.mp4

The "-ss" is the start time and the "-t" is the duration of the clip, allowing you to isolate just a small set of frames. And the crop parameter allows you to just take a portion of each frame. The crop format is "crop=width:height:upperleftX:upperleftY".

If you want stills you can do that too by just having the output file look something like this: jumpaction%03d.jpg.

Physics

Cloth

  • Add a plane which will be the cloth.

  • In vertex edit mode, RMB to get the vertex context menu and select subdivide. F9 to change the divisions to something more like 64. Though if you’re previewing you might start smaller like 32 or even 16.

  • With the cloth plane selected in object mode go to the Physics properties and click the Cloth button.

  • Object collisions needs to be checked.

  • Self collisions might need to be checked if the cloth drapes over itself such as the corner of a table cloth.

  • In object mode, select any objects that will interact with the cloth and got to their Physics properties and click Collision. I’m not sure if you can do multiples at one time with this operation; doesn’t seem like it so don’t count on it. Also note that sharp edges can just poke through cloth, so if it’s easy to bevel sharp corners (as on the default cube) it’s good to do so.

  • You can Bake the cloth physics but this can take an impressively long time. So maybe start with a short sequence, for example have the start and end frame be 1-50 or so.

  • Make sure you set the frame range sensibly! You must do this in the Cache section of the Physics → Cloth. It’s not good enough to just do it in the timeline. If you mess this up and your 30 frame animation is set to bake for 250 frames, you can stop it with Escape (not exactly sure where the cursor needs to be).

  • The cloth plane can be given thickness with a solidify modifier.

Pinning

  • In edit mode select some vertices to pin.

  • Go to the Object Data Properties.

  • Click the + under Vertex Groups. A new group called Group is created. It might be a good idea to rename it VG_ClothPin or something.

  • With the new VG_ClothPin group highlighted and some vertices selected, click Assign. Now you have recorded these vertices in a vertex group.

  • Back in the Physics → Cloth properties, look for Shape which will contain a field for Pin Group. Select the VG_ClothPin group.

  • For hooks to other objects, go to Vertex → Hooks → Hook To New Object.

  • This will create an Empty. I think, not 100% sure. This empty seems like it can control the VG_ClothPin group.

  • Go to the cloth object and look at the modifiers and you might see a Hook modifier. Apparently it’s very important that this modifier be at the top of the stack, above the Cloth modifier which is often above the Subdivision modifier.

  • If you want a physical flagpole kind of object instead of just the invisible empty, you can create such an object and then select it and then select the empty. Then [C]-p to parent it using Object (Keep Transform).

Python

The documentation is mysterious and this seems an arcane topic, but this link to official documentation is extremely helpful. This video tutorial is extraordinarily clear and patient covering many useful Python API concepts.

A good test tuple to start with is bpy.app.version Another good one — which will remind you that Blender carries its own completely separate Python installation — is sys.exec_prefix. Here’s what I’m showing.

/usr/local/src/blender-2.92.0-linux64/2.92/python

After looking at the quickstart guide you can start to appreciate the Python attributes and operators shown in UI hover tool tips.

Installing Dependency Modules

Of course fancy addons will want fancy modules. And since this is not system Python, it will appear that they are missing even when your system can use those modules just fine. You must first install pip in your Blender python.

cd /usr/local/src/blender-2.92.0-linux64/2.92/python
sudo ./bin/python3.7m -m ensurepip                   # Installs pip
sudo ./bin/python3.7m -m pip install --upgrade pip   # Upgrades pip
sudo ./bin/python3.7m -m pip install pyproj pillow numpy # Deps

Now it looks like GDAL is the real PITA. Sure Debian can get one no problem with apt install gdal. But things are tougher in the world of Blender. You have to go to this repackager’s repo and pick the right one. I guessed until I found one that worked. No idea what the compatibility parameters are.

W=https://github.com/AsgerPetersen/gdalwheels/releases/download/2.3.0_1/GDAL-2.3.0-cp37-cp37m-manylinux1_x86_64.whl
sudo ./bin/python3.7m -m pip install $W
sudo chmod -R a+X /usr/local/src/blender-2.92.0-linux64/2.92 # I had restrictive perms.

This also downgraded the Nympy. Why not? Go for it! After that, I could go to the Python console in Blender and import gdal came back with the goods.

Fix Autocomplete Key Binding

First off the default keybinding for autocomplete in the console simply won’t do (it’s [C]-Space). Go to "File→ User Preferences→ Input→ Console→ Console Autocomplete" and fix it to Tab.

Input

The one Python function that did not work which was a bit of an impediment for my purposes was the input("Prompt:") command (formerly known in Python2 as raw_input). I understand the limitation but what if you need to send user input to your Python activities?

This helpful tutorial has some answers. It says…

Because the user interface itself is written in Python and is designed to be extended and because virtually all internal data structures are accessible through a well documented interface it is pretty straight forward to implement add-ons that are written in Python.

Coordinates

From the Python console this will dump vector (object) coordinates for selected vertices.

[i.co for i in bpy.context.active_object.data.vertices if i.select]

Use i.index to get the vertex number instead of the coordinates.

Main Python Object Layout

bpy.data - Project’s complete data. bpy.context - Current view’s data. bpy.ops - Tools usually for bpy.context. bpy.types - bpy.utils -

from_pydata()

The from_pydata() function is a way to take Python data and make Blender data. Unfortunately, the documentation is perhaps hard to find and probably non-existent. However this is helpful. And this. And this.

Basically you need something like this.

import bpy
verts = [(1.0, -1.0, -1.0), (1.0, 1.0, 1.0),
        (-1.0, 1.0, -1.0), (-1.0, -1.0, 1.0)]
faces = [(0, 1, 2), (0, 2, 3), (0, 1, 3), (1, 2, 3)]
mesh_data= bpy.data.meshes.new("tet_mesh_data")
mesh_data.from_pydata(verts, [], faces)
mesh_data.update() # (calc_edges=True) not needed here
tet_object= bpy.data.objects.new("Tet_Object", mesh_data)
scene= bpy.context.scene
scene.objects.link(tet_object)
tet_object.select= True

In the from_pydata() function call, you need a list of vertices which are 3 member sets of floats. The second field is edges and the third is faces — you can only have one of the two. Leave the one you don’t use an empty list. The edge or face list is a list of sets connecting vertex indices. So an edge connecting the first vertex to the second would be [(0,1)]. There can also be quad faces with 4 values per set.

mesh_data.from_pydata(VERTS,EDGES,FACES)

Useful Functions

  • bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_plane_add()

  • bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_grid_add()

  • bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_cube_add()

  • bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_circle_add()

  • bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_cone_add()

  • bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_torus_add()

  • bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_ico_sphere_add()

  • bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_uv_sphere_add()

  • bpy.ops.mesh.duplicate()

  • bpy.ops.mesh.duplicate_move()

  • bpy.ops.mesh.delete(type=T) - VERT, EDGE, FACE, & more

  • bpy.ops.mesh.merge() - Not just for redundancy; makes square triangle.

  • bpy.ops.mesh.quads_convert_to_tris() - A tri isn’t subdivided, however.

  • bpy.ops.mesh.tris_convert_to_quads()

  • bpy.ops.mesh.edge_face_add()

  • bpy.ops.mesh.select_all() - In edit mode only and only the objects selectable.

  • bpy.ops.mesh.spin() - Surface of revolution.

  • bpy.ops.mesh.subdivide(number_cuts=N) - Edit mode. In a grid.

  • bpy.ops.mesh.unsubdivide() - Edit mode. In a grid.

  • bpy.ops.mesh.wireframe() - Interesting pseudo wireframes where edges turn into thin 4-sided sticks (as in chemistry).

  • bpy.ops.object.join()

  • bpy.ops.object.delete()

  • bpy.context.copy()

Video Editing

Although Blender is primarily a rendering tool, since the purpose of its rendering was envisioned to be for high quality 3d animations, it also is good at editing those animations. I have tried other video editors and found them to be very unstable with more than a few megabytes of material. Blender, on the other hand, has never failed me no matter what absurd thing I tried. The only limitation with Blender is understanding the millions of tools, options and settings. When a tool has so much functionality, it becomes difficult to simply read the manual which could take years and still hide the part you need among the stuff you’ll never care about.

Getting Audio To Work

It can be very frustrating to have everything ready to assemble, but no sound is playing. Here are some ideas about that. But what I had experienced was far more ridiculous.

I had to go to Edit → Preferences → System → Sound and change Audio Device from PulseAudio to None. Ah, but then comes the tricky bit. Then you have to go to Edit → Preferences → System → Sound and change Audio Device from None to PulseAudio. It’s obvious really, right?

Key Bindings

  • Hovering in the timeline area (not the sequencer), "s" and "e" will set the start and end frame to whatever the current position is.

  • "Home" in the preview window will make the image fit as well as it can.

Sequencer

  • Middle mouse button - Pan Sequencer area.

  • [C]-middle mouse button - Rescale Sequencer area.

  • Right mouse button - selects strips. Not left!

  • [S]-right mouse button - selects (or deselects) multiple strips.

  • Using the right mouse button to select a strip and then holding it down and moving a bit puts you in a move mode. You can let go of the right button and position your strips. When in the correct place, the left button with exit the move mode and leave the strips in the new place. Note that you can drop strips so that they overlap a bit and their box will turn red. When you place them, they will get auto positioned so that they are perfectly end to start.

  • Hovering over the Sequencer, "page up" will position at the end of the next clip. And "page down" will position the current frame at the beginning of the last clip.

  • "b" - in the sequencer start a selection "box" that can select multiple strips. Left clicks select the box.

Preparing New Blender For Video Editing

The first time you run Blender, there are probably some things you will want to adjust.

  • Click on the main graphics window somewhere to make the initial splash dialog go away. Now you’re looking at the "default layout".

  • Click the "layout drop down" button. Its tool tip is "Choose Screen layout" and it’s just to the right of the "Help" section of the main ("Info" - change with most top left icon) pull down menus. Choose "Video Editing".

  • This brings up the default Video Editing layout which contains these sections.

    • Video Preview Window - where the videos are shown.

    • Curve Graph Editor is to the left of the video preview window. Used to control complicated things like the speed of transitions, etc.

    • Video Sequencer - under the previous two areas is where video scheduling happens in a Gantt chart style.

    • Timeline - Useful for key framing.

  • The menus can be a little weird in Blender. For example, in the Graph Editor, the menu that controls it is below the graph display. Click the button to the left of "View" whose icon is a blue and white plot next to up and down arrows.

  • This brings up the major components menu. Change the Graph Editor into a Properties window by selecting "Properties".

  • In the Properties window, look for the "Dimensions" section and if it is open it should have a "Render Presets" menu. Use that to choose what kind of video you’d like to have. I chose "HDTV720p" for unimportant YouTube work, but "HDTV1080p" might also be good. Note that just below this menu, you should now see the resolution X and Y values that correspond to the preset you just chose.

  • Normal YouTube frame rate is 30fps. To the right of the X and Y dimensions is "Start Frame" and "End Frame". If you start at frame #1 and have 60 seconds of video at 30fps, what frame will you stop at? It’s the product of the two, 1800. If you know this ahead of time, adjust it now. If not, keep this in mind when it’s time to render.

  • Below the Start and End frame settings is the "Frame Rate" menu. You can change this to 30 or something else. One of the presets is "custom" so it doesn’t have to be a "preset" at all. Note that it is extremely wise to set this to be the same as your source video material.

  • Scroll down the Properties Window to the "Output" section. The default output directory is /tmp which is fine for many purposes, but if you’d like your Blender related files stored in a more sensible place, change this.

  • A bit below the output section is a menu where you can choose the output format. The default is set to "PNG" still images which is interesting to remember, but will require you to assemble a video file yourself. This is ok for short clips, but tedious for longer ones. Mikey suggests "Xvid". Unfortunately Xvid caused a lot of problems with seg fault crashing on rendering. Another possibly good choice would be "H.264" or whatever you think you’ll need. If a video you produce doesn’t work on the target you envision, return here to try different possibilities.

  • Next to the output type are two buttons "BW" and "RGB" which are both unselected. Unless you’re making an artsy black and white video, activate "RGB".

  • Go down to the "Encoding" area and open it if necessary. Go to "Presets" and choose "Xvid" here too (or whatever you’re using). This will then show up in the "Format:" pull menu nearby as selected.

  • Leave bit rate set to "6000".

  • Find the "Audio Codec" section. The default seems to be either "None" or "MP2". Mikey suggests "MP3" for videos with audio. Of course set "None" for silent videos. If you use MP3, change the bit rate to "192".

  • Make sure you choose a sensible container. Probably mp4 or avi and not matroska (unless you’re unconcerned if impoverished OS users never see it).

  • Back up at the top of the properties section, find the "Render" area and its "Display:" preset menu. Choose "Keep UI". Helps CPU usage during rendering. Just renders to a file.

  • Below the timeline area, look for the "Playback" control. That brings up a checkbox menu. Check the following.

    • Audio Scrubbing -

    • AV-sync - Make sure A and V are not misaligned.

    • Frame Dropping - drops frames to ensure smooth editor playback.

  • Go to "Info" section’s "File" menu and choose "User Preferences". Then select the "System" tab on the far right. Scroll down and look in the middle for "Memory Cache Limit". For 16GB systems a decent value is "10240" (add a zero to the default). Click "Save User Settings".

After you make all these initial changes, it is wise to not repeat the process every time you use Blender. Go to the main "Info" section’s "File" menu and choose, "Save Startup File". After doing that, you’ll be loading up Blender with your presets ready to go.

Importing Videos

  • Imports are placed at the current frame (green line in sequencer). So get that in the right place.

  • Use "Add" menu below sequencer. Select "Movie". Choose from the file browser.

  • Two strips from the file show up, an audio and a video.

    • Green - Audio

    • Blue - Video

Import Still Images As Video Sequence

This succinct video perfectly describes the process.

Import a series of images to include as a video.

  • Open a panel with "Video Editing" to get a video timeline.

  • Use "Add" bottom menu item and select "Image".

  • Hitting "a" selects all images. Select what is needed.

  • Press the button to right of path, "Add Image Strip".

Adjust frame rate.

  • Open a panel with "Properties".

  • Changing the "Frame Rate" setting there just changes playback speed.

  • To change the timing of this strip only select it.

  • Hit [S]-a to "add" something to this.

  • Select "Effect Strip".

  • Sub-select "Speed Control".

  • Look at the speed control effect strip’s properties on the right.

  • Check the box for "Stretch to input strip length.

  • To double the speed, you can change the "Multiply Speed" to 2.

Cutting

Often you just want to do a simple thing like cut off a bunch of stuff at the beginning and end that you don’t care about. The basic process is as follows.

  • Load the movie.

  • Select the one you want. Probably LMB these days (RMB in olden times).

  • Position the current frame where you want the cut. LMB on the timeline frame numbers works. And arrow keys.

  • Shift-K to make a "hard" cut. This makes two concatenated clips.

  • Select the end (if trying to cut off the end) or leave beginning clip selected.

  • Press DEL key and then confirm by left clicking the "Erase clip" message.

Adding An Image Or Static Overlay

Reasons for doing this might include the following.

  • Putting annotations on a video like YouTube used to allow.

  • Blocking out a certain part of the video.

  • Watermarking or branding of some kind.

The way to do this is to create an image separately.

  • Use the dimensions shown in the render presets to make an image the perfect size for overlaying. Note that you don’t have to go that big.

  • Use Gimp. Make sure the background is transparent where you want the video to show through.

  • Save the image and return to Blender.

  • Go to "Add" item on the sequencer menu.

  • Add an "image" select your file.

  • Position it and open it up a bit by dragging with the right button.

  • I found it easiest to match my entire scene by choosing the video I wanted it on, noting the frame start and length, then choosing the image and manually entering those so they match.

  • Go to the image properties menu on the right and change the "Blend" method to "Over Drop". This makes transparent parts show the video.

  • You can also adjust the offset (which is why you can get away with smaller images than the entire scene).

Split Screen

Similar to overlays, this technique can help present multiple simultaneous video streams. The perfect case example is trying to visualize a side by side comparison of two graphics cards. Assume that I take a video with card A called A.mp4 and a video with card B called B.mp4. I want to show the left half of A on the left of the screen and the right half of B on the right side of the screen.

  • "Add" both "movies".

  • Slide them around to align the content and trim the ends if needed.

  • With A selected, "Add" an "Effect Strip", "Transform".

  • With the green transform strip selected, go to "Strip Input" and check both "Image Offset" and "Image Crop".

  • Leave the offset at zeros but check the box.

  • For the crop, change the "Right" value to the width of the video divided by 2, e.g. 960 for 1920 wide (dimensions are helpfully listed under "Edit Strip" properties at the top). (Also make sure your overall render dimensions are as expected.)

  • Then at the top change the setting "Blend" to "Alpha Over".

That’s it for the transform strip. Make sure the transform strip is on top. The B strip needs to be visible, but you can turn off A’s visibility and just let the transform render what is needed from it.

Rendering

  • Save the project before attempting it! Actually save early and often, of course.

  • It might not be a great idea to render off of clips that are on flash drives. But it can be done.

  • Double check that Keep UI is set.

  • Choose "Render Animation" or Ctrl-F12 to start.

  • I got a lot of Segmentation faults when using Xvid. Better to use H.264.

Here are some settings hints that did work.

  • Display: Keep UI (!)

  • Preset: HDTV1080p Start with this (implies 1920x1080)

  • Video Codec: H.264

  • Container: MPEG-4

  • Medium quality

  • Medium speed

  • Audio Codec: MP3

  • Frame rate: 30fps (not 29.9whatever)

  • Anti-Alias: Mitchell-Netravali, 8, 1px

  • Output: FFmpeg video

Click Animation to begin render of the video.

Mikeycal’s Videos

It seems that a completely reasonable way to study video editing in Blender is to watch some videos on the topic edited with the same. The videos I found helpful were by "Mikeycal Meyers". The problem with the videos was that they were so comprehensive and patient that there are hours of material. That is a worthwhile exercise to initially learn Blender video editing, but after the first viewing, I found I needed a simple reference to the stuff he talked about. Besides providing a quick reference for cryptic key bindings, if I still have trouble, this list of what the videos contain can direct me to it. I commissioned my son to make the original list this is based on.

0 Introduction

No technical content.

  • History

  • Euros and dollars were equal in 2002

  • Blender was bought from someone else

1 Layout - Simple Stuff

  • Top left corner has drop down to select layout; to edit videos select the video editing option.

  • Replace curve graph editor w/ properties menu

  • Sequencer is where you put your videos

  • Properties window is important used for about everything

  • Set all default properties

  • Render presets

  • HDTV 1080p

  • For youtube use 30 frames per second

  • Use vlc to find FPS

  • Choose where rendered product goes, usually /tmp at default

  • Reset output format

  • xvid works best

  • Select rgb

  • Set preset to xvid

  • Set bitrate

  • Choose audio encoder to mp3

  • Set to Keep ui

  • Select audio scrubbing

  • Select AV-sync

  • Select Frame dropping

  • Save as startup file (preconfigured template) before any other steps

2

  • Channels are rows

  • Drag up for more channels

  • put cursor at frame 1

  • Click add and select type of media

  • Right click selects

  • Number on strips is different

  • Must be the same to be in sync

  • Select right frame rate

  • Strip/set render size

3

  • Right click is to drag and to select strips.

  • Import video.

  • Handles at front and back of strips to edit length.

  • Use cut tool to hard cut the strips.

  • Middle mouse (may not work).

  • Number on strips is # of frames.

  • Mouse wheel to zoom.

  • Home to see all of the strips.

4

  • Group select is B or Shift-right click.

  • Soft cut is when you drag the back.

  • Hard cut is Shift-K

  • Y key to constrain movement of strips to only between channels.

  • G key to constrain movement of strips to only along channels.

5

  • Channel 0 is above all

  • Higher the channel higher the priority

  • Don’t use channel 0

6

  • Can be either or resolution

  • Choose bigger resolution

  • If distortion after ^ then use image offset

  • Add/effect strip/transform

  • Transform makes whole new strip

  • Mute original