New course

 

The Hard Surface Accelerator, again, from the Blender Bros. They really know their Blender onions, although the course mistakenly applies some bad assumptions -- configuring Blender specifically for Hard Surface modelling. The idea that I'm some young whippersnapper hungry to break into the world of DCC. I think they could improve their game by being 20% less "Bro".

That said, it's so far been good content; it's solid foundational knowledge.

Let me record some basics about the Transform Orientations tool.

Transform Orientations

Crucial tool in the Object Mode. It tells Blender which set of coordinates to use for any transform operation you apply to a selected object.

Global: That grid system which has its own X,Y, and Z axis. The global coordinate system doesn't move.

Local: Your object's own axis. if your object is moved so it's no longer aligned with the Global coordinate system, use this. The coordinate system moves with the selected object.

Normal: This coordinate system is used in edit mode and applies the coordinate system to the normals of selected faces. One use for this is flattening out the faces by selecting them, applying the Normal coordinates, then selecting S and C, and scaling until all the faces are flattened.

You can also use the Normal coordinates to edit a landscape mesh, selecting faces and applying transforms along face normals.

Gimbal: This is a very niche coordinate system, mostly used when operating in the quaternion coordinate system, which handles rotations with an additional axis, without which Eulers get you into trouble. See Quaternion or Euler, understanding rotation. It's complicated, and it's mostly for animators.

View: Aligns the coordinate system to your current view. Moving the selected object along the Z axis is like performing a zoom.

Cursor: Align the coordinate system to your trusty 3D Cursor. Adjust the cursor's orientation from the View tab.

Parent: Previously, you'd need to select parent, snap and orient the 3D cursor to select, select the previous child, and set transform orientation to the 3D cursor. Now, you have the object to set the coordinates to that of the parent object.

More Terrain, always, it seems

Playing with atmosphere and Geo-scatter