25 Useful Blender tricks that aren’t so obvious

Posted on 27. Apr, 2009 by Andrew Price in Articles

Automatically add a number to the end of your .blend filename

In the ‘Save As’ window, press ‘+’ to add a number to the end of the name. This is very useful if you are saving multiple versions. If there is a number already in the name, blender will automatically increase that number by one.
Preview textures

The feature you always wanted was right under your nose! Simply Hold Ctrl whilst clicking the ‘Load’ button to take advantage of thumbnail previews. This feature however, is currently in an unstable state (which is why it hasn’t been made official yet), so use it at your own risk!
Changing the camera

Ctrl + NumPad 0. This also works on non-camera objects as well, making it very useful for positioning spotlights.
Copy any attribute of another object

In object mode: Ctrl + L brings up a menu that allows you to copy the attributes of any other object. This includes Materials, IPO data, Mesh Data, Lamp Settings as well as copying the object to a different scene. For example, if you wanted to apply the same material to 300 cubes at once, quickly select the cubes using the Box tool (B) then whilst holding down Shift select the object you want to copy, hit Ctrl+L and select ‘Materials’.
Switch to the opposite side of the viewport

Ctrl + 1,3 or 7 will show you the opposite side of the respective orthographic view.
Loop Select

Alt + Right Click on the edge that you want to select, Blender automatically finds and selects all vertices in that row.
UBUNTU USERS: By default Alt + RightClick opens a menu built into the OS. To change this you will need to go to System > Preferences > Windows and change the ‘Movement Key’ to either Ctrl or Windows Key.
Change brush size and strength on the fly

Whilst in sculpt mode, Press ‘F’ to change the brush size and Shift + F to change the Strength.
Camera Flythrough

Select Camera – Shift+F. The blender devs were even nice enough to include the controls in the header:
Quickly compare changes by storing a render in the buffer

Blender allows you to store one render in a temporary buffer in order to quickly compare changes you have made. To make use of this, render a scene then move your cursor to the render window and press ‘J’ this will switch to the previous buffer, make some changes to your scene and re-render. Now when you press ‘J’ again you will flip between your current render and the past render.
Render a small portion of your scene

Only making a slight change to the scene? No problem, switch to the camera and press Shift-B. This will bring up a cross hair allowing you drag a square over the area you want rendered. To turn this off, press Shift-B again, and drag outside the camera window. Alternatively you can go to the scene panel and switch the ‘Border’ button off.
Reset 3D cursor

Lost the 3d cursor? Hit Shift + C. To lock the view to that point, press ‘C’.
Change the default blender scene

Tired of having to set up your favourite lighting scheme everytime blender boots? Hit Ctrl + U to overwrite the default scene with your current one.
Merge Vertices

Alt + M. To speed this up even more, follow it with ‘5‘ to select Collapse from the menu.
‘Beauty Fill’ a hole in your mesh

Shift + F. It’s not always pretty, but it gets the job done.
Select an object behind another

Alt + RMB. No more accidentally selecting the wrong object!
Quickly switch screen modes

Ctrl + Left/Right Arrow cycles through your screenmode presets in the top bar.
Select all connecting vertices

In edit mode: Ctrl+L will select every vertice that is connected to that vertice. This also works in the UV unwrapping screen, making it one of the most useful features ever.
Rotate object as trackball

Press ‘R’ twice
Reveal alpha mask

Pressing ‘A‘ in render window reveals the renders Alpha mask. Unfortunately there is no way to save the mask as of yet. But a work around is to copy the image to the clipboard (Alt + PrintScreen) and edit the window border out in an image editor.
Select vertices with Lasso Tool

Ctrl + LMB allows you to draw a lasso shape around the vertices you wish to select. This is a useful alternative to the Box and Brush Tool (B).
Resize objects based on their texture dimensions

Alt + V will take the dimensions of the image from the texture slot and resize the object according to those dimensions.
Scroll through frames

Alt + Scrollwheel allows you to quickly scroll through your frames
Select more than one editing mode (vertex/edge/face)

Hold Shift while clicking the edit mode selectors to select more than one mode. To change editing modes on the fly, press Ctrl + TAB.
Subsurf objects on the fly

Ctrl + 1 quickly adds a subsurf modifier into your stacker without having to go through the menus. To use higher subsurf levels, use Ctrl + 2, 3 or 4
Move sliders in 0.1 increments

Hold Ctrl while moving a slider to move it in 0.1 increments (hold Shift + Ctrl to move it in even smaller increments)

Have I covered everything? Leave a comment below if I’ve missed anything!

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Tags: list, tips

65 Responses to “25 Useful Blender tricks that aren’t so obvious”

ckckck

28. Aug, 2009

nice tips/..thanks
carrepossesseion

09. Sep, 2009

my God, i thought you were going to chip in with some decisive insght at the end there, not leave it with ‘we leave it to you to decide’.
buyusedcars

09. Sep, 2009

I wish getting over a broken heart can be so easy as following a few steps.. but its not…
Andrew

11. Sep, 2009

Thanks, very useful!
amoummoneMova

27. Sep, 2009

Thank you for great post!
iiian

14. Oct, 2009

I found tip number 10: ‘Render a small portion of your scene’, very very useful, but… how do you get rid of that little square thingy bit of the scene when you want to render the whole scene again?
I have another question: can this technique be used to cheat Blender into rendering very high definition pictures? I am trying to render a 6800×6800 pixel image and Blender refuses to touch it. Could this technique be used to slice up the picture into managable parts? I could then stitch the bits together using a picture editor.
Yehppael

14. Oct, 2009

yeah, i found the same one interesting, the only one i didnt know about,
for iiian, you can put a four cameras in a grid, render the image and assemble them in gimp. You can even use this to render some parts on one pc and the other on another pc.
iiian

15. Oct, 2009

Thanks Yehppael for your reply. I can see how cameras on a grid would work if orthographic cameras were used. However, I am using a single camera for the shot with an 80mm lens – surely a grid would not work, since each camera would show a slightly different perspective.
Today, I tried using this ‘Shift + b’ technique to make managable pieces of my massive (6800×6800pixel) scene. The technique did not work. All I got was a low resolution, unuseable slice before Blender crashed!
Akta

27. Oct, 2009

Damn I didn’t know a couple of those! Cheers Andrew!
Luis Salcedo

13. Nov, 2009

Useful tips thanks so much …… I have another one to add.. it is a little tricky (and my english suxxx ):

I the 3D view you can roteate the point of view with SHIFT+holding click
(I think its right click if you never change the defalut settings… in my case I use LEFT CLICK to select / anyway)…

now the trick:
when the view port is rotating and you are near to an axis (x,y,z) HOLD CONTROL… this will adapt your view quickly to the “ortographic view” (front, side, top)
some kind of ZBrush like behavior
John

15. Dec, 2009

Nice article! Really useful stuff, especially to a newb like myself… that much closer to pro now, thanks
Xakhdiezi

09. Feb, 2010

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