It took me a long time to upgrade to Blender 2.6x as I was really used to my good old Blender. A way to make friends with new software is to explore possibilities as much as possible; here, some of the cool stuff I found (may include old stuff I never noticed before).

Don't be afraid of scripts!

Blender includes many useful, reliable, user friendly scripts. Fearlessly, go to user preferences > add-ons and try it out; next to each script, links to online docs are provided.

Two scripts I always enable:

- Dynamic spacebar menu. This will especially please blender-sauruses as it brings back the spacebar function from Blender 2.4x and earlier: a convenient tools menu.

- Copy attributes menu. With crowded scenes, it will happen that you want to modify many objects at once. There is 'copy to selected' in Blender UI (see below). But the copy attributes menu does more - for example, it allows copying modifiers and/or constraints from the active object to all selected objects.
Enable the script; then [Control + C] to use it.

- Object creation scripts. See examples below... Keep in mind that scripted objects provide parameters, so the tree script creates many different trees, the cog script creates many different... cogs.



Copy to selected

Meant to be the successor of the 'Copy attributes menu'. Say you want to display 100 objects with wireframe enabled. Then...
- add 'wire' display property to active object
- right click on the property and select 'copy to selected' in the menu.
Works in many places (not everywhere). Experiment...

Center origin/center cursor isn't gone

Often we'd like to recenter the 'anchor' of an object (not sure if blender calls it an anchor, maybe 'origin'). There was a 'centre' function in b2.4x that did just that.

It's not gone, it's in the tools. [T] in 3D view to bring up tools, 'Origin' button (fourth from top), lets you either put the anchor at the geometric centre, or at same location as 3D cursor.
What's that for? Well, objects rotate around their anchor, right?
You can position the anchor more precisely by entering coordinates for the 3D cursor ( press [N] in a 3D view and scroll to '3D' cursor).

Knife tool

Allows drawing 'cut-shapes' onto meshes. This can replace many puny operations like subdividing, cutting edges, redrawing faces etc...

A simple example: cut a window shape on a wall. Then 'cut a square' on top of the mesh and delete the inside.

Enter edit mode, [K] to enter knife tool; draw the cut shape and press enter.
The new edges are now selected; you can remove the inside (or extrude it etc...) by selecting matching faces.

shrinkwrap modifier

We've seen a way to 'cut shapes'. How about 'pasting shapes', e.g. 3D eyebrows on a face, moss to a rock (with or without particles!), 3D logo on a curved surface, or fitting clothes tightly?
Select the object you want to 'shrink and wrap' and enable the shrink-wrap modifier, then as 'target', assign the object you want to paste on.

grounded!

Game developers love their 3D objects to be dropped *exactly* on the ground at any time. However placing objects on the ground manually can be surprisingly time-consuming, and isn't accurate.
The object equivalent of shwrink-wrap modifier, 'shrinkwrap constraint', does that.
To use it, add the constraint to the object(s) you want to stick to the ground and select your ground object as 'target'.
You may need to adjust the location of the object's centre/anchor/origin.

Now you say, yea do I have to create this constraint for all my ground objects, it's gonna take ages... Hell *no*, enable 'copy attributes menu' in add-ons, then [Control + C] and copy the constraint to all selected objects at once.