13 Blender tips from the pros

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You can make Blender part of you professional pipeline with this set of workflow tips and tricks from five of its leading artists

Made in Blender (clockwise from top left) The Blender Foundation’s ‘open movie’ Sintel; Red Cartel’s animated TV series Kajimba; indie VFX movie Project London; Red Cartel’s print illustration work for P&O; and animation for Dutch TV show Klaas Vaak

Blender may be free, but it isn’t just a tool for hobbyists.

The powerful open-source 3D package is now used on a variety of professional projects, from the Blender Foundation’s own ‘open movies’ to illustrations, animated commercials and even visual effects work.

While the fundamentals of Blender are well covered by training materials available online, there is little information targeted specifically towards this new group of professional users.

To help you get the most from the software, we asked five of the world’s 8leading Blender artists to provide their tips for working quicker and smarter under real-world production conditions.

Their tips are presented here in roughly the order they would be used in a real pipeline, beginning with some simple but easily overlooked tricks for modelling and texturing more complex scenes; then moving on to
rigging, animation and compositing; plus a couple of tips for asset management on large commercial jobs.

Click next page for the first tip…