Chapter 17

Ten Tips for Working More Effectively in Blender

Working in Blender is a ton of fun, but you can adopt 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 Tooltips and Integrated Search

Blender is a dense program, and users often forget what a button does or discover a new menu. 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 to concisely describe what the button does. And even if the tooltip isn't completely clear, you have a better idea of what to search for to get help.

And speaking of searching, one of the best features of Blender is the fully integrated search functionality. Using the search hotkey (Spacebar) in a particular editor, you can type the name of the feature or tool you're looking for, and Blender shows you a list of operations that may match within the context of the editor that you're working in. Furthermore, if that operator has a hotkey, that hotkey also shows up in the search results.

Look at Models from Different Views

If you work in an environment modeling and animating by using just one 3D View, you should definitely make it a point to periodically orbit around your scene and look ...

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