Buy issue 250 here (opens in new tab) or subscribe to 3D World here (opens in new tab). This article was originally published in issue 250 of 3D World (opens in new tab), the world's best-selling magazine for CG artists.

This makes selecting larger pieces very fast. When you have separated your mesh with seams (Ctrl+E), you can select the individual islands in Face Selection mode with L while hovering over them. You can move with the WASD keys and even jump. Walk Navigation – Shift + F (Blender 2.8: Shift + ^)Ī very cool feature in Blender is the Walk Navigation that lets you move around in your scene with the camera like you would in a first-person game. If you're about to place leaves or other random stuff without a particle system and want to quickly alter their rotation, just hit R twice and you can nicely rotate the object trackball-like. When you're figuring out contours between two colours, this is especially useful and speeds up your work.

This lets you switch between the two active colours in Texture or Vertex Paint Mode, just like in Photoshop. This is very useful for cleaning up UV coordinates.

Further unwraps will then consider their position. When you're in UV Edit Mode, you can pin certain vertices to let them be fixed if you unwrap the model again. Especially when you're dealing with cylindrical objects, this comes in handy by being able to let you 'wander' the selection across the model. This enables you to grow (+) or shrink (-) the current face selection radially in all directions. This is very useful when you want to quickly isolate certain parts of the mesh for selective unwrapping or assigning vertex colours.

Turns the cursor into a circle brush that lets you 'paint' a selection of faces, vertices or edges.

Blender hotkeys 2.9