I released my newest online course today: Blender 3 Motorcycle Creation. This one was a lot of fun for me because I got to delve into the tiny details of creating the parts of a classic 1936 Harley-Davidson motorcycle. I love getting lost in the minutiae of projects like this. But I tried to keep it moving and not get bogged down so that it became boring or repetitive. I know not everyone is quite as nerdy when it comes to Blender modeling. But I do hope I imparted some of the fun in creating detailed models like this. And keep in mind that this is an artistic representation, not an engineering replica. I didn’t attempt to recreate every bolt and wire. That would make for a course that is way too long for even the nerdiest among us. So I hope there is a good balance between learning at a good pace, and geeking out a bit on some of the details. ​

And it was a lot of fun to use Substance Painter for this course as well. I know that some people are not happy when a Blender course deals with other software that is not open source. But frankly, Blender’s texturing features are just not up to par with industry standards right now. There is so much about Blender that is industry standard that it is disappointing not to have a more intuitive approach to PBR texturing. I think Substance Painter is a great compliment to Blender and allows you to create amazing textures that work wonderfully in Blender. Armor Paint (https://armorpaint.org/) is an open source texture painting program that is coming along very nicely. But it still has a long way to go before it comes close to Substance Painter’s power and ease of use. Don’t count it out, though. I’ll be keeping an eye on it to see how it progresses. ​

I forgot to contact Udemy before the release of the course to have them enable Adaptive Streaming, which allows students to view it at its original 1080 resolution. Someone else reminded me of that and I contacted them immediately. They say it should be ready in about 12 hours. So if you purchase the course and the resolution seems a bit off, just give it a little time. It will be at high resolution soon. ​

In Blender's Outliner we have the ability to create groups, or Collections, to store and organize the objects in our scene. It's pretty intuitive to use, but here are a few tips and tricks that you might not have come across yet.

You already know that you can create new Collections by right-clicking in the Outliner. And you move items by dragging and dropping them where you want. But you can also press the M key to bring up the "Move to Collection" menu. Here you can create a new Collection, while at the same time moving any selected items to that Collection, all at once.

In addition, if you hover over the Outliner with your cursor, you can press the Plus or Minus keys on the NumPad to expand or collapse all of the Collections. And to isolate one Collection, while hiding the rest, you can press the Ctrl key and Left Mouse Click the Collection. Ctrl-clicking the Collection again unhides all of the others.

And here's a tip regarding Materials and the Outliner. If you've ever tried to get rid of a Material in Blender, you know that it's kind of a pain. You usually have to first ensure that no objects are using the material, and then close the Blender file and reopen it. An easier way is to go to the Display Mode menu at the top of the Outliner and change to Blender File. Here you can go to the Materials section, select a Material, and just press Delete.

So there are a few tips and tricks regarding Blender's Outliner and Collections. Hope that helps.

All the best!
Darrin Lile