Back to school. Blender Bros free Solid Modelling Course

Back to Blender School

So I'm 10 years in. I should be a Blender expert. Instead, I'm a veteran who stopped learning and hobbled around the workflows with a small number of learned workflows for years and years.

This changes! It's a resolution for the new year that I'm starting on early. I'm going to try to maintain detailed notes of key lessons here in this very blog.

I'm setting myself a challenge that by the end of January, I will have completed two major Blender courses. Yesterday, I started the Blender Bros Hard Surface Modelling free jumpstart course. This is not a major course, but it's a good taster before investing in their heavily discounted Accelerator course.


Having completed the introduction to the introductory course, here are some things I've rediscovered:


MACHIN3tools

MACHIN3's free toolset for streamlining the most basic Blender operations. I already had this and installed it, but I ended up not using and removing it. I didn't use Blender regularly and only used MACHIN3tools for a short time. As a result, muscle memory kicks in, and the changes this addon makes cause confusion.


Tab change:

The tab key is the most fundamental step in Blender modelling. It switches you from Object mode to Edit mode. Once you are in Edit mode, you then select a context: Vertices/Edges/Faces.

With MACHIN3tools, this changes to a pie menu. Now, going into the menu, you select an Edit mode context, or if you are in an Edit mode context, you can select Object mode.

Tab select, Edit mode context select.

In an edit mode context, leave by selecting Object.

The first few times, this has already caused my brain to hurt. It's a significant change, but once you get it stored in your muscle memory, it means fewer clicks for things you do all the time. Previously, I didn't use it enough, so it tripped me up every time I used Blender.


Local mode

How the hell did I forget about local mode?! This takes you into the thing you are working on, hiding other stuff in the viewport.

Keyboard: "/" key.

I'd been using the hide command to isolate a target mesh. This is simpler. Firstly, this is a toggle. Hide needs a separate unhide control. Unhide, in its main use, unhides everything, including things unrelated to where you are working.

Next up.... a lesson about making a leg thing.