Blender

I’ve been trying to use Blender since what feels like the dawn of time, but its notoriously opinionated user interface clearly hasn’t stuck, and every time I go back to it I find myself having to re-learn the basics.

Regardless, I go back to it every year or so, and recently I’ve been experimenting with it as a video editor even if it seems to lack hardware acceleration for video encoding in some platforms.

This is essential if you want to do precision modeling for 3D printing:

1. Right pane, Scene Properties, Units - Metric
2. Right pane, Scene Properties, Unit Scale - 0.001
3. Right pane, Scene Properties > Length - Millimeters
4. Top right toolbar, Overlays (Viewport Overlays), Scale - 0.001
5. Pull the View Tab, End - 100000 mm
6. Click the camera, Right Pane, Camera Settings, End - 100000 mm

…then go and save preferences (don’t forget to set Emulate numpad in input settings)

The canonical way to do network rendering out-of-the box in 2.76–2.79 was to:

1. Remove objects and lighting from the default scene
2. Enable the netrender addon in User Preferences...
3. Select it from the top-level menu
4. Set mode to Master and set the master parameters in the side panel
5. Save the file as master.blend
6. Set mode to Slave and set the slave parameters in the side panel
7. Save the file as slave.blend

After copying the .blend files to the relevant machines, they should be invoked as such:

# master
blender --background master.blend --addons netrender -a -nojoystick -noaudio

# slaves
blender --background slave.blend --addons netrender -a -nojoystick -noaudio

This is, of course, ridiculous since it bakes the IP address and port of the master into the .blend file, but might be fixable by manipulating the file itself.

• The 2.76b version that ships with Ubuntu Xenial (16.04 LTS) armhf doesn’t include the netrender add-on for some reason. 2.79 is slated to ship with Bionic (18.04 LTS) armhf, and appears to include the add-on.

Stuff I typically turn on:

• CAD Sketcher
• Scene and Layer Switcher
• 3D-Print Toolbox
• Modifier Tools
• Loop Tools
• Precision Drawing Tools
• Node Wrangler
• ST2 (because Blender’s kerning is atrocious)

• Blender’s Achiless heel is the lack of video stabilization in the VSE, which means you have to do it manually–this is a pain and it’s really hard to get any really useful results if you’re doing handheld pans and zooms.
• Creating title sequences in Blender is pretty straightforward using Scene strips in the Video Sequence Editor (VSE), but:
• You need to set the source scene’s Film to Transparent in the Render Properties tab to avoid a black background.
• To get scene strips to render correctly in preview mode, you need to pull the View tab from the right edge, go to View Settings > Scene Strip Display and set Shading: Rendered.
• Speeding up things:
• In the VSE preview, you can also go to the Render Properties tab and set Performance > Compositor > Device to GPU if you have a compatible GPU, and go through the denoise nodes to set them to GPU as well, with Preview Quality set to Fast.