21 expert Blender tips and tricks
Artists from Blender Studio have compiled a collection of expert tips and advice to help you boost your Blender skills and knowledge
Improve your Blender workflow with this top advice from the pros
01
Blender’s node-based shader editor has the potential for a very powerful and customisable workflow when you know your way around it. It allows you to use multiple different techniques to layer and blend materials and set up dynamic relations between parameters and properties. Some of these techniques are straightforward and directly exposed in the interface, but for others you have to know just the right buttons to press.
This set of tips is a collection of tricks and good practices touching on different parts of the shading pipeline to enable a more flexible and procedural workflow.
01 NODE WRANGLER
If you are using Blender’s shader editor, you should activate the Node Wrangler addon. It makes your workflow much more efficient with things like a preview node and a Lazy Connect feature. You can enable it in the Preferences under the Add-ons tab. Simon Thommes
02 DELETE ANY UNUSED NODES
To clean up your node tree visually you can simply press Ctrl+x. This seeks out all the nodes that are not contributing to the output at all and removes them from the graph. Simon Thommes
03 MULTIPLE UV LAYERS
To get individual control over the alignment of different texture elements on your asset, you can create multiple UV layers. Usually you want at least one without any overlapping for baking and texture painting, but for procedural elements it can be incredibly useful to have additional maps to align patterns and shapes.
Here I am using a UV layer to align seams on Ellie’s jacket that are generated by a procedural texture. The helpful benefit of this is that I can change the seams separately from the jacket at any point. Simon Thommes
04 COORDINATE WARPING
You can manipulate coordinate maps like UV maps before plugging them into a texture node. For example, you can warp the coordinate space of a texture using a colour noise. The easiest way to do this is using a MIXRGB node set to Linear Light to shift the coordinate vectors of the map with that noise. This way you can easily add additional interest to patterns, noise textures or even hand-painted image textures. By tweaking the noise properties and the strength of the warp you can adjust the effect. Simon Thommes
05 SCRIPTED EXPRESSIONS
By simply typing the ‘#’ symbol into a value field you can very easily drive that value dynamically with a scripted expression. These expressions allow you to set up connections between properties and use mathematical operations.
A very effective application of this is procedural animation. By using the ‘frame’ variable in an expression you can reference the current frame of the scene.
So by typing ‘#frame’ into any value field you get an animated value that increases by 1 every single frame. Combine it with mathematical functions and operations to change the animation speed and shape. Simon Thommes
06 NODE GROUPS FOR GLOBAL SETTINGS
If you want to drive multiple shader parameters in your scene with the same value, you can do that even if they are not within the same material. You can simply make a collection of input nodes for the parameters you want to make global, and combine them in a node group by pressing Ctrl+g.
This settings node group can then be used in various materials to control multiple parameters from within the node group at the same time. Simon Thommes
07 DYNAMIC MASKS FOR SHADERS
Step 1: Instead of combining a material that is made up of multiple different shaders within a single set of texture maps, you can use a black and white mask texture to blend between them non-destructively. This mask texture you can simply paint in as an image texture or alternatively as a vertex colour layer.
Step 2: Of course, vertex colours require quite a high resolution of your geometry if you want to have a detailed mask. But what makes this workflow incredibly powerful is the use of very simple gradual masks in combination with guide textures. That way you can very easily paint in a simple mask and the more detailed version is then just generated automatically. Simon Thommes
These tips are aimed at people who are interested in character rigging in Blender, with a large variety in skill levels. That might include people working at a studio who are trying to transition their core animation pipeline to Blender, or just individual hobbyists that are trying to get their one-man animation project going.
In my work at the Blender Animation Studio, I am the sole rigger in the team, meaning I'm the single responsible person for making all characters in the shorts move and articulate well. Since
I have to rig a lot of characters,
I use as much automation and proceduralism as possible, which means a lot of Python scripting!
08 DISCOVER BENDY BONES
Bendy Bones are a somewhat hidden but awesome feature that give bones a curve-like behaviour. In my workflow, almost every deforming bone is a Bendy Bone! It's great for cartoony, rubber-hose like deformations, which is a perfect fit for our stylized short films.
To find this feature, set your Armature's viewport display type to B-bone. Then select a bone and increase the Segments parameter under the Bendy Bone panel to any number greater than 1.
You should see the subsegments appear in the viewport. Now to control the bone's curvature, create two controls, one at each end of your Bendy Bone. Set your Bendy Bone's start and end handle types to Tangent, then set your two newly created bones as the start and end handles. Rotate them, and your Bendy Bone bends! Any mesh deformed by this bone will deform according to its curvature. Demeter Dzadik
09 QUICK CONSTRAINTS
You can add constraints super quickly using the shortcut Ctrlshift-c. For example, in this setup, I can select Tail Control, then select Bendy Bone, press Ctrl-shift-c and choose Stretch To. Now my Bendy Bone is also a stretchy bone! Demeter Dzadik
10 LEARN PYTHON!
No Blender tip collection would be complete without a
mention of Python. Even with just a small bit of Python knowledge, you can help yourself out in so many situations. For example, just the day before writing this, I wanted to disable all Shrinkwrap constraints in my rig for a performance test. I have hundreds of those constraints for this character, and this is such a specific task that no addon exists to do it for me. So, I quickly opened a text editor panel, typed out a few lines and pressed Run Script. It took ten seconds! Demeter Dzadik
11 PROCEDURAL RIGGING WITH RIGIFY
The easiest and fastest way that I know of to create character rigs in Blender is the Rigify addon. After you’ve enabled it in your preferences, you can add a Human metarig via Add>armature>human (Meta-rig). Then, in the Properties Editor under Armature>rigify Buttons, you can find a Generate Rig button, which will generate a fully fledged character rig! The great thing about this workflow is that you can adjust the metarig in edit mode to the proportions of any character, then generate the rig again to get a new rig that fits your character! Demeter Dzadik
12 DEVELOP YOUR OWN RIGIFY FEATURE SET
This one is for those of you who already have plenty of Python experience – you might be excited by the idea of procedural rigging, but are unsatisfied with the rig types and options that are in Rigify. I have good news: Rigify is not just a rig generating addon, it is a rig generator framework!
You can start developing your own Rigify feature set using Python, by following the documentation at: wiki.blender.org/wiki/process/Addons/rigify.
The Rigify API creates and governs the rig generation process for you; it provides the user interface, creates the armature object, switches object modes, and so on. With this you can focus on the code that matters to you, which is creating the bones, the constraints and the drivers for your desired rig setup.
Your newly implemented rig types will show up in the Rig Type selection drop-down menu, along with whatever parameters you chose to expose for that rig type.
This also means you can scour the internet for Rigify feature sets that other people have created, such as my very own Cloudrig feature set. Demeter Dzadik
13 WEIGHT PAINTING: SHOW ZERO WEIGHTS
While weight painting, small weights on random parts of the geometry might show up that you didn't intend for. These mistakes are a lot easier to notice and clean up when you set the Show Zero Weights overlay option to Active! Demeter Dzadik
14 MULTI-PARENTING WITH ARMATURE CONSTRAINT
The Armature constraint is a constraint type that was added in early 2.80 development, and I think not enough people know about it! It lets you parent a bone to several other bones, just as you can rig a piece of mesh to several bones.
In this setup, the Mouthcorner.l bone will be parented 2/3rds to the Jaw bone, and 1/3rd to the Head bone. You can even put a driver on their Influence values to have a parent switching setup.
Note that a bone with this constraint should have no regular parenting! That would result in a double-parenting effect. Demeter Dzadik
In this small collection of tips and tricks I will discuss some lesserknown features and general advice for the sculpting workflow in Blender. There can often be small, helpful tricks that perhaps aren’t stated or emphasised often enough, or because of the release cycle of new Blender versions it can happen that you miss out on some great new fixes or features that can make your life a lot easier. So let’s take a look at some examples!
15 SMOOTH BRUSH FOR DYNTOPO
While sculpting with Dyntopo (Dynamic Topology) enabled the surfaces under your brush will be dynamically tessellated and more geometry will be added or removed. This can make the sculpting workflow effortless since the user doesn't need to worry about resolution.
This sadly often results in very unclean, bumpy surfaces. To prevent this you can use the Simplify brush, which exclusively tessellates surfaces. Increase the Autosmooth slider to add a smoothing effect to the brush. Now you can remesh and keep your sculpted surfaces smooth at the same time! Julien Kaspar
16 RESET YOUR BRUSHES
After updating to a new version of Blender you might end up with some outdated brushes in your own startup file. This is because the default brushes in Blender were regularly updated in the past releases to give the most optimal behaviour and sculpting feel. If you want to get the best new brushes you should either reset your startup file completely, or in the brush options use Reset Brush on your brushes. Afterwards save your startup file to keep your new and improved brushes. Julien Kaspar
17 DRAW SHARP BRUSH
The Crease brush was always used in Blender to achieve sharp brush strokes. The way the brush works is by pushing the surface in or out and pinching it at the same time. This unfortunately also often results in stretched geometry. Try the new Draw Sharp brush as a great alternative since it is using a more consistently sharper profile instead. This will result in cleaner sharp strokes, especially when sculpting on a fixed topology with the Multiresolution modifier. Julien Kaspar
18 APPLY OBJECT SCALE
While transforming your objects in Object Mode you could end up with non-uniform scaling. This will negatively affect your brushes and tools in Sculpt and Edit Mode. Apply the scale of your selection with Ctrl+a to resolve those issues. Julien Kaspar
19 SMOOTH FILTER AFTER REMESHING
One of the new inclusions to Sculpt Mode has been the Mesh Filter Tool. After remeshing your object or otherwise ending with very unclean surfaces, you can smooth the entire object with this tool instead of using the Smooth brush. Julien Kaspar
20 POSE BRUSH WITH DISCONNECTED MESHES
The Pose brush is a fantastic tool to rotate, move, scale, squash, stretch and twist your objects in Sculpt Mode. Merge objects and disable the Connected Only option to do all this on multiple disconnected pieces at the same time. Julien Kaspar
21 THE MANY USES OF FACE SETS
A relatively new inclusion in Sculpt Mode has been the addition of face sets. These have more uses than one might expect. They can be either painted on with the Draw Face Sets brush, by creating them from a mask, or based on various other inputs that you can find in the Face Sets menu.
First of all the face sets can serve as a way of having multiple masks at the same time. There’s no practical limit to how many face sets you can use on a single object. With the Automasking options in either the brush or sculpt mode preferences, you can limit the effect of brushes and tools to specific face sets. You can also point at them and hide/ isolate them by pressing H or Shift+h, too.
This way you can join and work on multiple objects at the same time in Sculpt Mode and manage what is affected by your tools easily and in a visual way. Any object that is joined will get a new face set colour assigned. Overall, working with face sets can be effortless. Julien Kaspar