I’ve been a member of the Blender Cloud since 2016, and one of the benefits you get is that your local copy of Blender can interact with… well the Blender Cloud. You can access texture files, HDRIs, save your files, upload your renders and work in progress – all without leaving Blender. That’s cool!

What I can never remember though is how to actually start this thing. I thought I’d write it down here, in the hope that I’ll remember to search this site and find this post. Here’s what we do:

Press CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + A

That’s it! Almost. Before doing that, we must save our .blend file, otherwise anything we pull from the cloud cannot be saved inside our file (a .blend file isn’t just a file, it’s a whole folder hierarchy by the way, which is why we don’t need to specify complicated paths again – very clever).

I assume you’ve got the add-on installed too, which goes without saying. The Blender Cloud folks have a video about that though, check it out:

The other day I tried to create a simple necklace in Blender 2.8, only to find out that the way I’ve once learnt from Blender 2.79 and below using DupliFaces no longer works. This feature has been removed from Blender 2.8. Thankfully there’s an easier way to do this, using the Array and Curve Modifiers.

For this example I’ll create a circle for our path, and an object I want to duplicate on it. Perhaps a UV Sphere. Make sure to apply all transformations after any scaling operations with CTRL + A.

I’m so used to pressing A to select or de-select everything in Blender. It’s been so ingrained in my brain that I cannot easily get used to the new default behaviour in Blender 2.8. Thankfully there’s a simple tick box in the Preferences that will bring this option back, so there’s no need for my brain to get confused any more.

Here’s how to do it:

Head over to Edit – Preferences and choose Keymap. Towards the top you’ll find a tick box called Select All Toggles. It’s slightly misleading to read out loud, as it doesn’t mean “select all toggles”; it rather means that the “Select All” function will now “toggle”, as it did in Blender 2.79 and below.

Now the A key will behave in Blender 2.8 as it always has.

I through I could some of my computers to good use by helping them render animations. Everyone is stronger together as a team, no matter if we’re built on carbon or silicone. Sadly though, Blender doesn’t start its GUI via RDP, which means it’s not so easy to speak to the application – unless you employ clunky workarounds.

That’s where the command line interface comes in handy. We can issue a text command to Blender, telling it which file we’d like to render, where to render to, and which frames of an animation to render.

Before I forget how it works, I thought I’d best write it down somewhere.