Revisions

Every now and then I come across something that significantly speeds up or simplifies one of my previous videos. One of the best examples is using Material Preview lighting. Of all my tutorials this one probably has the most general appeal of anything on the channel.

It also has some very unnecessary extra steps. At the beginning of the tutorial I indicate that you need to change to the shader workspace, change from object to world, add an environment texture and then you can add the studio lights that come with Blender.

Many months down the road I found out that you can just go to the world tab in the main view. Click the yellow dot beside color and choose the environment texture from there. Nothing major, but much faster than opening a new workspace everytime.

These types of things crop up a lot. In my "Make any Molecule" video there is a painstakingly slow part where I pick out all the cup segments for each type of atom, delete them, and then slowly make all the instances real and merge by group of atom or bond.

Instead, you can use the collection search option to find all the "_cups". Delete them all quickly, then clear the selection, and grab everything at once using "Select Hierarchy" for the whole molecule collection. From there, make instances real and Ctrl + J to join, and merge by distance in edit mode. This easily cuts a full five minutes from the original video and much to my chagrin I only discovered it months after the tutorial was published.

If the dev blog does nothing other than correct these oversights it will have already been completely worthwhile in my mind.