Blender 2.8 is being shipped with vectorized monochromatic icons, which means it won’t pixelated in the zoomed view, it is a benefit for high-resolution displays.
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Group mesh in Blender
Keeping things organized is key when it comes to working on a large project.
I was working with another Animation package on a big project that had many assets. All the assets where created according to the physical scale and built. The project had many scenes, I started organizing it by naming mesh and grouping them for easier selection and to have a better workflow.
Continue readingBlender (Animation) keyboard shortcuts
Animating is a very time-consuming process and one of the longest tasks in some pipeline of production. To speed up the artist Blender offers keyboard shortcuts that can save you small amounts of time, in doing things like playback, frame rate or even view frame by frame.
Main
A – toggle frame skipping.
P toggle ping-pong.
↵ Enter start playback (when paused).
Numpad 0 toggle looping.
Numpad . manual frame stepping.
Playback speed
1 NumPad 60 fps
2 NumPad 50 fps
3 NumPad 30 fps
4 NumPad 25fps
⇧ Shift +4 NumPad 24 fps
5 NumPad 20 fps
6 NumPad 15 fps
7 NumPad 12 fps
8 NumPad 10 fps
9 NumPad 6 fps
/ NumPad 5 fps
- slow down playback.
+ speed up playback
Frame by Frame
← step back one frame.
→ step forward one frame.
↓ step back 10 frames.
↑ step forward 10 frames.
⇧ Shift+↓ use backward playback.
⇧ Shift+↑ use forward playback.
⇧ Shift hold to show frame numbers.
LMB scrub in time.
Ctrl++ zoom in
Ctrl + - zoom out
Esc quit
Have a question? Leave a comment below.
New improvements in Blender 27.8
Blender foundation recently announced 27.8 RC release which has some new features and major improvements over the last release, the release notes are still in progress with refinement for final builds so far it has been great until then let’s have a look at that these changes.
Grease Pencil improved
Grease pencil has come a long way now and has a lot of improvements in this version, it now offers various kinds of brushes as seen in the below
image.
The improvements made in it have turned it into a production-ready alternative to other 2D animation software, allowing users to mix 2D drawings/sketches with 3D objects in a composition makes it greater than ever see it in action in the video below.
GP -“Skull Chaser” Fan art, character by Jake Parker, based on a Anthony Holden anim) by Daniel M. Lara (Pepeland) from psl on Vimeo.
Animation
It’s now even more interesting to animate in Blender with the improvements of Bendy Bones (Advanced B-Bones for Easier + Simple Rigging**) **which makes it easier for animators to create their own rigs, using fewer bones.
Keyframe Types
Keyframes Types: is also a new feature introduced it helps you separate or categories key in Jitter, Extreme, Breakdown, Keyframe, this becomes a very handy setting because you can now separate your keys with different colours in Dope Sheet as seen in the image below
Alembic
Now Blender finally supports Alembic(.abc) file support this means if you have software like Maya or Nuke in your pipeline compatibility is better.
Supported object types for importing:
- Cameras
- Curves
- Empties (including Maya locators and the likes)
- Meshes
- Points (read as a Mesh object with only vertices)
Supported object and data types while exporting:
- Camera
- Curve
- Hair
- Mesh
- NURBS
- Particles
Better Threading Handling
Blender could render on multi-threads since a long time ago but now support multi-threading in tasks like depsgraph and it can execute several tasks in parallel making it have better performance with CPU that have 8-16 threads.
You can learn more about bugfixes and new features from the release note
If I have missed something let me know or if you would like to share some experience or suggestion over this release leave a comment below,
Thank you for reading.
GPU rendering with Cycles Renderer
Rendering is a time-consuming task as the system has to compute geometry, shading, environment, ray-tracing and other information and running this process on a CPU can take a lot of time.
GPU rendering can save a lot of time as it can compute 2D/3D much more efficiently, stay tuned to know how.
This is one of those features that makes Blender so nice to work with.
How fast is it? Why? How?
GPU’s have components that are designed for tasks like rendering, baking real-time-rendering(gaming), which makes them better at this process as a result taking lesser time than a CPU, but it is not compulsory that it will be faster than CPU because it depends on the type of the GPU sometimes they can be faster other times it can be slower
Blender currently has CUDA based Graphics Card and has just introduced initial support for OpenCL-based AMD Graphics Cards. The performance aspect completely depends on your hardware specification.
Settings for GPU Compile
GPU rendering in Cycles renderer is known as GPU compile to enable this option we need to change certain user preferences (the availability of these option depends on your hardware specification).
Go to File > User Preferences
Switch to System tab.
In the bottom left you will find Compute Device:
As you can see in the above screenshot there are two tabs available, this means Cycles renderer supports the GPU with OpenCL(AMD graphics Card) If you are using Nvidia graphics Card the second tab would be CUDA if the graphics card is supported.
Switch to the second tab and click the drop down menu you will find a list of Graphics Card.
Once you Compute Device has been set correctly you should find the Render panel offering **Device: **(shown is the screenshot below)
Hit Render, In the first GPU rendering, it will run prepare the rendering kernel which might take some time.
Thank you for reading,
Keep on rendering