Blender For Dummies®

Chapter 17. Ten Tips for Working More Effectively in Blender

Working in Blender is a ton of fun in any case, but you can get into a few good work habits to make the experience even more enjoyable. These good habits let you work faster without sacrificing the quality of your work. In this chapter, I detail ten of my best suggestions for working more efficiently and effectively in Blender.

Use Blender's Tooltips

Blender is a dense program. It's not uncommon for users to forget what a button does or come across a menu that they've never used before. This is especially true if don't use Blender for a while. If you don't know what a button in Blender does, hover your mouse pointer over it. More often than not, a helpful tooltip pops up that concisely describes what the button does. And even if it isn't completely clear, you have a better idea of what to search for to get help.

Constantly Check Models from Different Views

If you work in a single window environment, modeling and animating using just one 3D View window, you should definitely make it a point to periodically orbit around your scene and look at it from a bunch of different angles. This is particularly important when modeling because it's very easy to get a model that looks perfect from the front, but really distorted and goofy-shaped from one side. Split off another 3D View window if you need it, or use the numeric keypad hotkeys to quickly do spot-checks from different angles. I also recommend taking advantage of the Smooth View ...