#blender3d tips

[oatsssss]

Blender Snapping

Enable snapping to get those edges perfectly aligned.

Shift -> Tab

When the verts are smushed together, remove doubles to merge them. A box at the bottom of the left sidebar will show an option for the merging threshold.

[oatsssss]

Unity-like Prefabs in Blender

Throughout this project, I’ll be reusing common models like doors, tables, chairs, etc. What I need then, is to be able to make a change to a model, then have all other instances of that model reflect that change. In Unity, this is achieved with prefabs, but I didn’t know that a Blender solution existed until today. In Blender, this can be achieved with linked objects.

My strategy is to have a master (library) .blend with all the models that I’m going to reuse. Then in the scenes that require the model I just link to the library and grab the object from it.

This means you can never delete the library .blend, otherwise the links get broken. It’d also be a good idea to keep “Relative Path” checked when linking as well.

File -> Link

You may find that once you have the linked object in the scene, you can’t move or manipulate it in any way. In order to be able to move, rotate, or scale the object, a proxy is required.

Object -> Make Proxy...

Now when you want to make a change to the linked object, just make the change in the library .blend and reload the linked scene.