Organizing your Blender projects to keep your sanity

https://youtu.be/PkNGD5Jb448

When you get too much going on in your Blender projects, it can be confusing keeping track of the final result of a composite of many modifiers on an object. There are a couple of tricks you can use to keep things organized.

First of all, learn to use the local view (Numpad /) to view a single object or group of objects without the contributing objects mucking up the view. Local view is kind of a viewport buffer, not doing any actual hiding of object or changes to your scene, but giving you a temporary view of what you want to see and work on.

The next trick is to hide (H) objects. This can be done in the outliner or with the menu or hot keys. Hiding objects removes them from the view, but they have to be unhidden before they can edited.

A way to kind of bet objects out of the away but keep them editable is to change their Maximum Draw Type in the Objects menu. Making the object so they'll only be drawn as bounds or wire frame, regardless of how you render anything else, means that they'll be there, but distinct and harmless to your eyes. The Bool Tools plug-in does this by default and I kind of like this one the best.

Of course you should organize things in layers, though as projects get bigger using layers for individual elements tends to be a bad idea. Still, for small projects Moving selected objects (M) to different layers can help keep things tidy.

I hope this video doesn't feel rushed. The videos I plan on producing this week have been somewhat more ambitious than I've had bandwidth for. Maybe it's been the weather. But when MyTechHigh contacted me with a student question, it kinda became the only video I could wrap my head around. Quick, simple, but hopefully helpful. People have been asking for more Blender content, and while, again, I have ambitions that outstrip my ability to produce right now, maybe this will scratch that itch. Will this get me past my mental duldrums and start making the content that I want and need to produce to stay on point? Time will tell.

EDIT: Crap, forgot the closing music. Dang it.