Blender offers a few different light types like spot, sun, point, but you don’t have to use “lights” to light a place or have some object glow. One way to do it is to use an “Emission” texture. Let’s look at how this would work.
I have this scene with a recessed LED light.
The center of the light is just a circle that I can apply texture to that is different from the casing.
Click the Material Property Tab in the property panel for the center circle and add a material. By default you are going to get a Principled BSDF
Change it to “Emission”
Then set the color of the light right below. See below for some examples of indoor colors (image from HyperIkon and I added the HEX value)
Only thing left is to adjust the Strength. Just play with the number to get what you’d like the effect to be. The following render is with a low value.. Under 10 I think:
This one is at 150:
One thing that you have to pay attention to in case you need to have 2 states: One ON and one OFF is that a 0 value for Strength will make the material black.
So you may want to revert to an another material to render the light if it is OFF.
In many scenes where there are building of tech stuff you will see pipes somewhere.. Turns out that building pipes with nice elbows along their path is pretty easy to do in blender. I’ve seen many different ways to do it but this method is straightforward and flexible.
The method goes like this:
Build a path by extruding Vertices
Add Bevels to all the vertices to make nice elbow shapes
Convert the path to a Curve
Add Depth to the curve Geometry
That’s it. Here is the step-by-step in Blender 2.83
Add a plane
Go in Edit mode (press Tab), make sure all 4 corner vertices are selected and merge them all
Now extrude the single vertice along the path you’d like (Press E, then move)
When you are done, select all the vertices and hit the “Bevel” tool. There are two things you need to be careful about:
1- The Bevel tool should be set as “Vertex Only”. You can find that in the Tool tab in the property panel.
2- make sure you add a bit more segments (like 5) to have a nice round elbow
Get out of Edit mode and convert the shape into a Curve, in the Object Menu -> Convert to -> Curve from Mesh/Text
Now you can go to the Curve Property in the right panel
Make sure the “Fill Mode” is set to Full.
Then in the Geometry sub menu, find the Bevel sub-sub menu, and adjust the Depth to whatever size you want for your pipe. The Resolution setting makes the pipe smoother but you can use a subsurface modifier to make them super smooth later
And here you go.. With a Subsurface modifier you get very nice pipes
If you use blender you probably know how to move around the viewport with your mouse. Flying around your scene, zooming in and out but the view you render is the Camera view. I’m not sure why (maybe that’s possible but I don’t know how), I can not do a render of what I’m seeing in the viewport. No. It has to be the camera view.
The thing is something I feel really good about a certain view position in the viewport and it would be great if I could align the camera exactly to that view. Well! It’s possible and it’s actually very easy.
PLace the view the way you like it:
If you like a specific view, hit the keys: Control – ALT – Numpad 0
A main Camera is moved and adjusted to the right position. But there may be a small tweak to do. In my example above here is what happened:
The Camera had the wrong Field of view. That’s an easy fix, just go to the Camera panel and adjust it the value you that works best. Mine had a Field of view of 11 degree,
and putting it at 60.6 framed it exactly as I wanted
In case you have a laptop with no numpad or something, you can always do the same with the “view” menu –> Align View –> Align Active Camera to View
That’s is. You can generate your rendering with the same view as your viewport.
You’d like to do a chain for a drivetrain, or you’d want to do a roller coaster or something that repeats the same object or shape along a defined path. Let’s see how this can be achieved with Blender. First it’s important to realize that there is one contraint to think about: Should the object deform itself along the path, or should the object remain in its original shape but just rotate along the curves of the path. For a roller coster, you will likely deform the shape, for a chain ring, you won’t. This choices changes the settings you need.
Let’s look at the first case, which is when the object deforms itself.
1 – Repeating along a path with deformation
Let’s first create a basic shape, whichever you like:
Then add a Bezier curve
This will add a basic curve on the main plane
Select it if not already selected, and go in Edit mode by hitting the “tab” key.
You will see that the curve has 2 vertices (at each extremity) and you have the ability to modify the shape of the curve by playing around with the red lines. Extrude the vertices (using the “e” shortcut after selecting a vertice) to create the path you would like to achieve
If the path needs to be a loop, you can close it by selecting the two open ends and hitting the “F” to make the final segment. You can also find this action in the menu Control Points
That should give you a full loop
Getting out of edit mode you will have a nice view of the path
But here is one catch.. It’s very possible that as you were moving vertices around, you didn’t stay in the same plane and if you rotate your view you will see something like that:
IF your path was supposed to be that way it’s cool. But if you need it to be a on single plane, you can go in edit mode, select all the vertices, the use the scale (“s” shortcut) along the axis you want (i.e the Z axis if you want the shape to be flat on the main plane) and then choose 0. That will flatten it all. I repeat => Select all vertices in edit mode, type “s”, then “z”, then “0”.
Now you can rotate the whole curve to align it with your main shape
We are now ready to repeat the shape.
To do so, you will need 2 modifiers: an Array modifier, then a Curve modifier.
For the array modifier, add a few shapes in the “Count” setting and choose your axis according to the direction you want
The relative Offset will determine how far apart (the offset) the shapes are from each other. In the example above (at 1.4) it will look like this
If you increase it to 2.1 for example you will see the shape farther apart
You can adjust this later anyway so don’t worry too much about it for now. Let’s add the curve modifier
Click the small square in the “Object” setting to select which curve to follow for this modifier
You will see the BezierCurve we created earlier, select it.
That will apply the curve to the object and looking in your viewport you will see your shape following the path
As we said earlier the shapes are deformed along the path, which is what we wanted
Now play with the count setting and the offset to have the object along the entire path.
Great.. Now let’s see how to NOT deform along the path
2 – Repeating along a path without deformation
For this one, I will create a different shape so we can see things a bit better. Something like this:
To avoid deformations, we need to NOT apply the curve to the shape, but to a small plane that will follow the path. Our object will be parented to the Plane and will repeat itself along the path without deformations. To avoid any issue, we need to make sure Origins are all concurrent and that scales are all reset. If not you will see some strange movement of the Shape along the path.
First, let’s make sure the Path has its origin to its geometry. Select the path, then right click and choose “Set Origin -> Origin to Geometry”
Then select the Shape, and do the same so both have their origin well placed.
Add a plane and scale it down a bit so it’s not too big.
Make sure the 3D cursor is set to the origin of the Plane. Select the Plane, right click and choose: Snap -> Cursor to Selected
Now select the Shape and snap it to the 3D cursor, that will move the shape to the same place as the Plane because both Origin will be concurrent. Right click on the Shape then Snap -> Selection to Cursor
Both the shape and the plane are in the same spot
Then select the Plane and add the Array modifier and the Curve modifier like we did earlier.
Play with your own settings of course
Notice that I used the “Fit Curve” instead of exact count this time, and chose the BezierCurve. This will make the repeat go along the entire curve.
But now comes the trouble that most people don’t mention in Tutorials.. For some reason, for others it works perfectly but it didn’t for me, so hopefully this help you.
When I increase the offset between the planes, they dont extend along the curve, they just stop disappear!!
With 2.3m offset with 5m offset!!!!
That was strange to me.. After searching the web, I found out this was an issue with the Scale. In fact if you scale the Plane you will see the shape extend along the path as you scale more. See below (I put the Offset back to 2.5m)
Scaling up will expand the plane along the path
Obviously this is very hacky..
Then I found on another forum that you can Apply the scale and rotation to an object and that will fix this automatically!! Select the Plane, go to Object -> Apply -> Rotate and Scale
DONE!! The Plane is now all along the Path, as we wanted when we chose “Fit to Curve”.
All you have to do now is Parent the original Shape to the Plane. To do that Select the Shape first, then shift select the Plane (so both are selected). Right click and choose “Parent -> Object”.
Nothing seems to happen.. That’s because we need to instantiate the Shapes now.. This is done on the Plane properties. Select the Plane only, then go to the Property panel, in the Instancing section
Click “Faces” and you should see a nice chain being created in the viewport. Unselect “Display Instancer” and “Render Instancer”. The Instancer is the Plane, you don’t need to see it anymore unless you want to change it.
Here is the result
You can make the original Shape disappear, but notice that in the collection hierarchy, it is now under the Plane. That’s because of the Parent relationship we created earlier.
Click the small “eye” icon for the Cube and the Bezier curve and you are good to go.
One more thing. The object you have now cannot be scaled up or down easily, or you may want to change some of the rings along the way. To do so, you have to make all the duplicate real..
Select the object and go to Object -> Apply -> Make instances real
Now each of the duplicate is a single object and you can scale the whole thing to your liking.
When you model a scene, you add lights.. That’s pretty typical. The problem is when you go in rendered mode with eevee you will have these annoying lights in the way of your scene. If you disable them from the viewport their effect on objects will go away as well.
The solution: remove the “extras” from the overlays. Here is how to do this.
Texturing a wall would seem pretty straightforward.. select the whole wall and apply your texture to it.. Unfortunately the default UV Unwrap doesn’t see it that way and will consider each faces are more of less independent. In a wall, the likelihood of having several faces is pretty high, in particular if you have windows or doors in it.
The way to do this is to go in orthopedic view (hitting “5” on the keyboard) then place your view facing the wall (front, or right, etc..).
Go in edit mode, select the faces you want to texture as one.
Go to the UV menu and choose “Project from View (Bounds)”
In the UV editor you will notice that all the faces are projected on the UV Map as shown in the view and you can then play around with the shape to place and scale it the right way.
Sometimes you may be modeling an object and then adding details by creating a second object. But once you are done you want to combine them together into a single object.
For example we have a Wrist (robot wrist) here:
wrist object
And a cylinder
The cylinder
If you select both objects and right click with your mouse, a menu will appear and an option to “join” both will be there
The numpads allow you to quickly change views: Front (key “1”), Top (key “7”), Right (key “3”), Camera (key “9), etc and change from orthographic view to Perspective (key “5”). On a regular keyboard, these keys are on the actual numpad but on a laptop keyboard, you have to change the settings.
Go to the preferences in the “Edit” menu:
Go to the Input section and check the “Emulate Numpad”
That’s it. You can now use the numeric keys on your laptop as if they were Numpad keys.
If you need to select all vertices, edges or faces of an object through a single selection you will need to “see” all of them. This is one good use of the Wireframe view. In Blender 2.8 you have a bit more option and could have a surprise.
Selecting the wireframe mode will remove all the faces from view so you can only see the edges. But it’s possible that the wireframe does not display the back edges, basically not seeing you see through the object.
To see through in Wireframe mode, you need to change your “shading” options
Check the X-Ray option and play with the setting value. The higher it is, the more you see the back edges.
Note that you also have a “transparent” option that you can use to see through object but it has less granularity than the X-Ray option
If you need a background image in order to guide you through the modeling of some object or scene, it’s pretty straightforward to do in Blender 2.8. There is a video here too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj-C0MkDVjc
First find the image you want to put in the background
Second put your viewport in the right orientation (top, front, side, etc) using the little gizmo in the top right
Then drag and drop the image from Finder (on Max) to Blender
Then it is likely that the image is not positioned in the right place and not at the right scale. You can resize the image using the yellow boxes at each corners of the image when it is selected
Resizing the image using the yellow squares
You can also place the image in the right spot using the keyboard shortcut “g” then move the mouse. This will move the image.
One difference with Blender 2.79 is that the background images are visible even in 3D views.
The basics of basics in Blender 2.8 