Blender Tips & Tricks

Blender Tips & Tricks

I've been using blender more and more and there are a few things that are important to know

1. Adding shortcuts for switching between vertex, edge and face.
Constantly clicking the 3 icons gets old. Mindbogglingly, blender does not allow you to do this with a single key press.

This hotkey addition changes that:

props to John Howard in the blender forums for this. 

I only copied the image here so that it doesn't disappear into the internet void over time.

2. Prepping for import into UDK

ORIGIN

Just before I export a blender object to fbx format for UDK I make sure its origin is at its center. This is not obvious:

1. SHIFT-C to move the cursor to the center of the environment

2. select your mesh in object mode

3. OBJECT : TRANSFORM : ORIGIN TO 3D CURSOR

3. OBJECT : TRANSFORM : GEOMETRY TO ORGIN

SCALE
Pay careful attention to your object scale when you export into UDK. I usually keep a text file in the blender object folder that indicates the scale I used when I exported it into UDK. My scale can be all over the board when I am using background images to build an object. It is super easy to adjust the scale of an existing object in UDK. Just change the scale on export from blender and reimport the mesh in UDK.

STAPLES OF MODELING
You need to get super comfortable with adding vertexes and faces. I do a ton of grabbing vertexes (press g), extending vertexes (press e) and making faces/edges (select 3-4 vertexes and press f). For g & e you can follow up the keystroke with a direction keystroke (x,y,z).

SCREWED UP FACES IN UDK
Invariably you will run into weird looking faces in UDK that looked fine in blender. This happens because you defined a face with 4 vertexes and they are not on a plane. Trust me, this is a total head scratcher the first time it happens to you. You may find yourself with a face oriented wrong, missing, normal on the wrong side. You fix this by deleting the face in blender and creating 2 triangle faces to replace it. Generally I recommend never adding a face with 4 vertexes unless you are absolutely sure it will remain a plane.