21 EXPERT BLENDER TIPS AND TRICKS

Artists from Blender Studio have compiled a collection of expert tips and advice to help you boost your Blender skills and knowledge

01 NODE WRANGLER

If you are using Blender’s shader editor, you should activate the Node Wrangler addon. It makes your workflow much more efficient with things like a preview node and a Lazy Connect feature. You can enable it in the Preferences under the Add-ons tab. Simon Thommes

Blender’s node-based shader editor has the potential for a very powerful and customizable workflow when you know your way around it. It allows you to use multiple different techniques to layer and blend materials and set up dynamic relations between parameters and properties. Some of these techniques are straightforward and directly exposed in the interface, but for others, you have to know just the right buttons to press.

This set of tips is a collection of tricks and good practices touching on different parts of the shading pipeline to enable a more flexible and procedural workflow.

02 DELETE ANY UNUSED NODES

To clean up your node tree visually you can simply press Ctrl+X. This seeks out all the nodes that are not contributing to the output at all and removes them from the graph. Simon Thommes

03 MULTIPLE UV LAYERS

To get individual control over the alignment of different texture elements on your asset, you can create multiple UV layers. Usually, you want at least one without any overlapping for baking and texture painting, but for procedural elements, it can be incredibly useful to have additional maps to align patterns and shapes.