[SFX]

1. When using undo and redo look in the edit menu, you have undo (Ctrl-Z) and undo action (Shift-Z), the former will cycle back and include selections, the latter will cycle back but skip selections

Try this on say a cube made editable, select a poly, move it, select another and move that. No check out the differences in the undo commands

2. Putting a light in am emitter, check the box saying no light radiation and make sure shadows are off

3. You know you can temporarily deactiavte a hynernurb by clicking it's green arrow, but what if you have many of these in a scene ? would you have to deactivate each one ? No !! look to your left hand menu bar, and go to the icon called turn/on turn/off generators, now this looks like it will effect emitters by it's icon but is does not do that in fact it actually will turn on and off all the HN's

4. Do have a play with bezier nurbs, increase the grid points and maybe add some deformers, try a spherical wrap to make quick and malleable vizors or TV screens

5, Construction planes - you find these in the objects modelling menu, try this add a CP. change it's Type (plane) now switch on snap to enable snapping and construction plane create acube, it snaps to the plane, now move the plane on the y axis create a sphere, it snaps to the plane, in this way CP's can be used to help in orientating your objects when modelling

6. Rotating an object, create a cube, now choose the rotate tool, you will notice that if you click and drag on the green circles on the axis you actually change the size of the cube, but you should see a red bounding box for the cube, click on each corner of the cube and drag the mouse, the cube rotates around the central pivot point as if pulled from that corner, try another corner..see the difference ?

Click on each axis..not the axis circles and you rotate on only that axis

7. The object and the model tool..very confusing but the see the difference create a cube a sphere and a pyramid, move them in the Y so that that are stacked ( visually) on top of each other with a fair gap. Now group them so thay reside in a nul object. Choose the model tool, the one which looks like axis and animate the null size over time, you will see the changes to all the objects in the viewport but play back the animation and there is no change

Now do the same thing but use the object tool, the one that looks like boxes, spheres and pyramids, see that the objecst no cahnge size as the null is changed and this is actually recorded. The rule is use the model tool for modelling and the object too for animating

8. Editing animation tangents, not sure about your setup but in mine in i animated a cube moving across the screen and have show animation path on i see the point on the path at the keyframes and can move them around but cannot change the tangents from the viewpoint, to do this show the f-curves window, select all and choose curves - soft interpolation now in the viewport i get to see the bezier handles to manilpulate each tangent

9 Double click the time slider "handle" to get a go to frame box

10. Middle mouse click in a view will switch to four views and back to single view

11. use save project when saving a scene this will auto create the tex folder and save all textures

12. Havin problems with visible lights ? move the inner distance out it is this that determins the visibility

13. Can't see a speed increase when using Pyrocluster video post ? make sure the there is no shadow casting

14. Want to drop a cube quickly on a floor ? well a default cube is 200 m high so if you place the floor at -100m it will be exactly at the base of the cube

[t3rmin4t0r]

about #3, it will aslo turn off all primitive objects.
nice tips. some good workflow suggestions.

[SFX]

Rendering animations.... don't waste resources use your keyframing ability

For example need a high SPD for a close up but start the animation far away ? keyframe the SPD settings to go from low to high or even set up an xpresso to adjust this as the camera nears the object

Similiarly use keyframed image maps ( or xpresso again) to switch from low res to high res as you move in

Also when rendering a scene why not save and close the scene down, it does not need to be open when rendering and wil save some ram ( i think)

[SFX]

Got this fix from cgtalk. If you create say a cube and a floor then look in a side view if you select the cube you cannot see the floor to move the cube down onto it

Switch the display from isoparms to wire frame to get the floor to show

[SFX]

Confused about the to co-ordinates panels ?

Create a cube and make it editable, if you look in object manager you have it's co-ordinates as it attributes changes here will affect the cube as a whole

Now look at the co-ordiantes manager that is the one with the apply button (wish it was live as well ) now change the y value here and click apply..the cube moves in the same way as if you used the co-ordinates in it's attribute settings

Now select any point and in the co-ordiantes manager ( the one with the apply button) change it's x amount then click apply. see ...only the point moves you can not do this in the attributes of the cube

Note you can also change these values in the structure manager

[SFX]

When rendering a amimation of a landscape say with a paning camera you may want motion blur for the floor but if you use VMB it is not moving so will not blur ( SMB takes extra renders)

Well as the floor is infinite you can simply animate it moving ,say on the z axis, this will give MB to the floor

[SFX]

Problems with lighting...

If you set up a 3 point light rig with spots ( and for the hell of it try the shadow caster option in r9.5) you wiil by default get these nasty ring effects:

 shads1.jpg (9.25K)
Number of downloads: 23

To ease this go to each lights settings ( or select all three) amd lower the contrast down ( i used -49 %) then up the intensity to compenaste..gives :

 shads2.jpg (7.14K)
Number of downloads: 27

[SFX]

Seperate grid settings

Generally when you go into the view settings for a viewport and uncheck the grid box you will remove the grid from all views

If you want to have for example no grid in the perspective view but grids in the other views then make your perspective view active and then go to the view settings in your attribute manager, uncheck the grid box and then right click and choose "make parameter local"

[yarko75]

About lighting i have this problem when I put a light into a scene then it becomes very dark so then i add another light on the other side of my scene then i get a very unrealistic veiw and it looks really crappy. Im not sure what to do becasue if i put a light on one side then the other side is pitch black, Is there any way i can fix that?

[SFX]

go to the detail tab and use fall off ( inverse square is good) then adjust the size of the fall off, if you find that you get a stong hotspot the try inverse square clamped

[yarko75]

Thanks that really helped, now i can finish my scene.

[nabil]

Really Great tips ,thank you alot it really helped

[booletwins]

Thanks for the effort of setting up these tut's & tricks for everybody SFX!
A really handy site :-)

[WieSel]

Great tips, work is getting easier :) Thanks a lot. I am working on my first tutorial.

[yarko75]

I got a couple:


1. You can add more than 1 deformer onto an object. Like the explosion and twist deformer. You can also add deformers to particles.


2. To see your objects better press atl+o, hold ctrl+shift+z to redo your camera position and by holding 1,2, or 3 and clicking on the screen you can move, rotate and zoom.


3. By Using the vectorizer (Objects>spline primitive>vectorizer) You can create splines from using black and white images, and then later extruding them.

4. Using the enviroment object you can light up your scene or have a better feel to it.

5. By saving you scene to shockwave3d (file>export..>shockwave3D) you can get 3d representations of your scene, dont make it too complicated or it will take forever to render. You can also render in multipassVR (advanced render).

[SFX]

When working with deformers it can be a problem trying to edit meshes. For example make a cube with enough subdivs say 5 5 5 amd make the cube twice as high, now add a twist modifier and twist it

Ok now make the cube editable, by default it will switch back to the non twisted version, to cure this in the attribute manager choose display and then check the box deformed editing

Now you can edit the deormed mesh but still have control over the modifier

another tip is far less known and is a bit hidden. If you right click on the center of the axis stems you get a new set of options, maybe you have never seen them !! This lets you control how the axis is derived

THis is usefull if you have several object under a null object and you find that when you have selected points on all the objects and want to scale them and find that you get odd results due to the fact that you may have say rotated the parent null. You can set the axis to parent in that case

[SFX]

quick changing materials

There are several ways to do this, here is an easy method

Say you have hundreds of objects scattered around your object manager with a green mat on them, some are buried deep in hierachies

now you want to change them all to a red material.

An easy way to do this is to select the green mat in the material manager and right click and choose select textute tags/objects

Now you can drag and drop your red material over to the attribute manager and drop it in the material field under tag properties

[SFX]

Infinite lights and soft shadows

create a cube then drop it to a ground object, create a target spot and then change it to a infinite with soft shadows and render. All is fine

Now move the cube on the x axis and render, at some point the shadows will dissapear, i got this at about 700 units

The cure ?
look at the shadow paralel width setting, increase this till you get your shadows . for the cube at 700 units on x and the light target at 000 i had to set the shadow width to 5000 Some times on large scenes i have to set the width to a huge number 50000 +

for example with the cube at - 5000 units i have to up the shadow width the 50000, but then the shadow gets very soft and needs increasing way beyond 2000 x 2000

another option is to use a distant omni light ( which the sun is) this will cast your soft shadows with no need for a parrallel setting

[SFX]

Reducing memory usage

Does your object really need a uvw tga ? if you are using mats projected as cubic, spherical etc then you most likely will not need a uvw tag and you can delete it to save memory

Try this make a cylinder with masses of polys say 100 height segments and 1000 rotation segements, make it editable then right click and choose object info, it will show a mem usage of 5988 k, now delete the uvw tag and the mem usage is 2800 K of course this would make a big difference on a large scene with loads of objects