Some Useful Blender Tips

Some Blender tips and tricks that I’ve built up over my short time, so saving them here so I don’t forget them :D
This will keep being updated as I think of them.

Circular Array #

This used to be a weird, complicated thing about parenting empties with offset origins, etc.
Now, we just get a circle with verticies where you want them, then use Geometry nodes to instance whatever you want onto it.
So EZ now!

Edit View: Local coords #

shift + numpad 1,7,3, etc aligns view to object LOCAL coords instead of global!!!!
This is super useful if you’ve rotated the object away from norms.
e.g. You have a cube, you rotate it to align with something else, but then you want to do some modelling on a face of it but pressing the 1,3,7 combos now don’t line up. shift + 1,3,7 will align to local coords so you can!

Quick Geometry Nodes Displace setup #

The below nodes plug into the Offset socket of the “Set Position” node.

Basic displacement geometry nodes setup

Geometry nodes weirdness #

Collection Info node sometimes needs “Realise Instances” node
- This is usually when you need to modify the instances e.g. “Set Position”, scale, etc
Collection Info node sometimes need to tick “Separate Children” and “Reset Children” and “Pick Instance” with Random or something plugged in
- This is usually for instancing items from the collection, instead of the whole collection, but I’ve had weird behaviour around this before. i.e. needed to tick it when I didn’t think I should.
MAKE SURE SCALE IS APPLIED!!!
If you don’t want a field, get “Object Info” and plug “Location” into a socket like Index or ID
- Especially useful for node groups that take scalar values e.g. seed
- Issue is that if you plug “Random Value” into Seed so you get a random value per displace, it does it as a field (Random output is a field), which means that EACH POINT gets a different seed
- Instead, turn the Random output into a scalar with this trick
  Weird trick to get a scalar value out of a field