Transition to Blender: some tips

[Alex_M]

Awesome stuff! I'm looking forward to seeing the new layer manager implemented. That's one of the features that are missing to make Blender complete. Anyways, I just donated a small amount of money to Blender Foundation. Hopefully more people donate so we can speed up the development process. I see that Blender is downloaded around half a million times a month. Imagine if 10% of this number donate even 5 EUR. That would be more than enough to employ a good amount of full time developers.

[jstrob]

Awesome stuff! I'm looking forward to seeing the new layer manager implemented. That's one of the features that are missing to make Blender complete. Anyways, I just donated a small amount of money to Blender Foundation. Hopefully more people donate so we can speed up the development process. I see that Blender is downloaded around half a million times a month. Imagine if 10% of this number donate even 5 EUR. That would be more than enough to employ a good amount of full time developers.

I love the idea of the Blender cloud subsciption! By subscribing we help Blender's developement and we get access to all open movie assets, tutorials etc. https://store.blender.org/product/membership/

I didn't subscribe yet but will do it soon!

[jstrob]

Again about the grease pencil, in max there is no way to draw freehand curve (apart with some plugins). But in 3ds DOS, there was one! See this article.

[jstrob]

Awesome stuff! I'm looking forward to seeing the new layer manager implemented...

One thing I just noticed is an add-on that ships with Blender too that allows to edit easily linked files. One master file can call smaller chunks of the file which can also call themselves even smaller chunks. And from the master scene with everything in it, you can transform the smaller chunks but not edit them and from just a keyboard shortcut (numpad /) you can jump into the smaller chunk and edit the object while all the rest is not there obviously.

So it's very useful for architectural project like this one from which I learned this trick
http://www.3dtotal.com/tutorial/1948...arch-viz-scene

And since like you saw in my test Blender is so fast to load, I guess it will work very fast.

The addon is called Edit Linked Library and it ships with Blender since 4 years.

[jstrob]

In fact there seems to be a lot of layer system addons for Blender (not all shipping with it but still free).

One that looks the best so far: Super Grouper
https://blenderartists.org/forum/sho...-Grouper/page5

https://github.com/mifth/mifthtools/.../super_grouper

And some Super Grouper users says they use it with the shipping with Blender "Layer Management" addon to create sublayer.

As far as I understand the super grouper create other blend files on the fly to hide the objects in them so for complex projects it also speeds up the scene when hiding layers.

[JuhaW]

Super grouper addon is by far the best solution for me to handle objects.
It creates another Scene to hide objects, not another .blend files or any new files.
I also fixed the latest error so its now usable again: https://blenderartists.org/forum/sho...=1#post3104011
Great thing of this addon is that you dont need to know which layer(s) are your objects, just hide/unhide your named groups with eye icon and thats it.

Layer manager is good if you dont use layer groups with it, its unreliable for that kind of use.

[jstrob]

Super grouper addon is by far the best solution for me to handle objects.
It creates another Scene to hide objects, not another .blend files or any new files.
I also fixed the latest error so its now usable again: https://blenderartists.org/forum/sho...=1#post3104011
Great thing of this addon is that you dont need to know which layer(s) are your objects, just hide/unhide your named groups with eye icon and thats it.

Layer manager is good if you dont use layer groups with it, its unreliable for that kind of use.

Ok thanks fo rthe info. So that was you I saw that post from you on blender artists.