We have a such a knowledgeable community here and it was suggested recently that we should have a Tips & Trick sticky so you can share gems you have found with the rest of the community I will start the thread off with a recent Tip & Trick added by Cybermonk Orientation Trick 

 think LuxXeons bridge tool should be here too

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2888517

if nothing else it taught me to hit F6 and see if it has options ;-)

mine would be add the backslash "" as a shortcut for simple subD  

Lobo feel free to delete this post once read but before we get to many tips and tricks added to the thread it might be helpful to establish some ground rules in your opening post.  Make the distinction that this thread is for a Tip/Trick/Hint and not a tutorial like "How to model a rocketship".  I would also suggest that in the first line of any new post that the nature of the tip is identified first and then the tips description.  This would make it much easier to scan through once the thread starts to roll over to many pages.

For example the opening first line of a post could be:

Modeling - Using the Bridge Tool  

Particles - Gravity Settings 

Nodes - Organising the Node Tree

My thoughts for your consideration.

We have a such a knowledgeable community here and it was suggested recently that we should have a Tips & Trick sticky so you can share gems you have found with the rest of the community I will start the thread off with a recent Tip & Trick added by Cybermonk Orientation Trick 

as was pointed out by keppel I should have considered laying  down some ground rules for this sticky to work Yes you should be only posting Tips Tricks and Hints this is not a tutorial thread. There is another Sticky with informational links that also includes some Tutorial links. I will look into a submission format that would be helpful to search for and include some key info that should perhaps be included in a Tips Trick and Hint post  Thanks for pointing this out Keppel

Here's a quick tip. Probably well known, but going to try anyways.

Holding down control during a move/rotate/scale operation temporarily toggles snapping. (Typically controlled by the magnet icon.) And this snapping also works along with XYZ constraints during those operations. So if you have snapping set to nearest face instead of the starting grid setting, you could snap something like a glass onto the top surface of a table while moving it along the Z-axis. Likewise if you have snapping toggled on by the magnet, pressing control temporarily gives you free movement.

As previously suggested to help group the tips, tricks into categories that would be more search friendly once this thread starts to accumulate pages consider when submitting a tip or trick that you format your submission as following.

In your first Sentence or Title

These are just examples

Modeling: bridge tool trick

UV Mapping: keyboard quick keys

And so forth thanks to Keppel for suggesting this  

Outliner - Drag and Drop Parenting

In the Outliner drag any object in the Scene list onto another to set as parent, the tool tip "drop to set parent" will be displayed.  To un-parent drag any child object to the bottom of the Scene list, the tool tip "drop to clear parent" will be displayed.

User Interface - Create a Floating Window

You may already know that dragging on the diagonal lines in the top right corner of a Blender window will create a new interface window.  If however you hold the "Shift" key down when you create a new interface window it will become a floating window instead.  If you have a dual monitor set up it is especially useful as you can create a Blender session that spans both monitors by dragging the floating window across to the second monitor.  This set up is not persistent and will not save if you press Ctrl+U.

Modeling - Access Precise Mesh Information In Edit Mode

Select an object in your scene, and acquire useful information about it quickly in the viewport, by accessing the Mesh Display roll-out of the Properties Panel ( Hotkey N).  Some of the quick technical information you can access about your object includes Face, Edge, and Vertex Normals Direction (useful for orientation of your polygons), Edge Angles and Length, Face Area, and Face Angle.  This information can be invaluable for precision modeling, and overall success in performing many modeling operations on your mesh.  For example, the face area information can be used to identify faces which can be selected by the Select Similar Area tool; and the edge length feature is very useful for modeling mathematically, with precise rotation, or for creating very predictable and non-self-intersecting bevels on dense topology.

General interface usage - selecting or finding things quickly

The commands for Select All (A), Box Select (B), Paint Selection (C), and Center to Selection (Numpad .), aren't just good for 3D window or 3D editing. They may also work in various menus and screens in Blender. So if you want to select a lot of files for an image sequence you can box select them, likewise if you want to quickly find where your selected mesh is in the outliner, then hover your mouse over the window and use center to selection.

There may be some other selection related hotkeys, but these are definitely handy to start out with.

Node editor adding detail nodes

I came across this sort of combo tutorial and Tip thought I would share it. I had never considered using just the node editor for adding detail with out actually modeling it into the actual mesh so this was a really interesting way of doing it with out having to add more polygons to the mesh 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7YUSdWDPZs    

This should Resurrect this thread

User Interface - Assign Hotkeys to each sub-element mode.

After you bring up the selection menu with CTRL+TAB, simply highlight the mode you want, then right-click on it. This will bring up another menu, which will allow you to assign a hotkey. Simply put your mouse over the box, and type the key you want to assign it to. Again, I used 1, 2, 3, which overwrote switching between layers. So as long as you don't switch layers constantly during every modeling session, this shouldn't be a problem. Finally, once your hotkeys are set, you need to save the Preferences, or it will not retain them when you close the software. So go to File>Preferences> and click on Save. *Credit to LuxXeon for this tip.

Thank you for sharing this keppel

Came across this and worth while tip for beginners and as a learning some modeling fundamentals "Easy way to create a sphere with all quads and no poles" https://youtu.be/Y64W7OeiqE0

Selecting an Edge Loop (a ring-like set of vertices) Hold ALT while right-clicking between any 2 vertices and it'll select the entire continuous set E.G Add a sphere and try this to see the function

Copy and paste values without clicking Blender supports copying values (even colours) without you having to click in the entry field, select all, copy it... Just hover the mouse over a value and press CTRL+C, go to the entry field (the box where you type stuff, if you didn't know) that you intend to paste this value, hover over that and press CTRL+V It's there! Same procedure for copying colours- in fact, even easier, colours can be dragged from one spot to another to copy their values

Zoom in to any area In the 3D view, Press SHIFT+B and draw a square around the part you want to zoom in to. Watch it go If you get lost just press the HOME key on your keyboard or SHIFT+C

Blender Tutorial - Hard and Soft Edges Not so much a tutorial but pretty useful Tip and trick for Hard and Soft Edges

Precision Modeling To Scale (Real World Units).

In your Scene Properties tab, choose between either Metric or Imperial units. By default, Metric will use Meters as the base unit of measure, but you can work with much smaller metric units as well by adjusting the Scale parameter. Just do a Google conversion for Meters to whichever metric unit you wish to work within your scene, like millimeters, then adjust the scale accordingly. For example, we know that 1 Meter = 1000 Millimeters, so if you adjust the Scale parameter to 0.001, your Blender scene units will now become Millimeters because you have reduced the default by 1000x. You can verify this is true by tapping N to bring up your Properties panel, and checking the dimensions of the objects in your scene; they should be measured now in Millimeters (mm). As yet another example, the default cube in a Blender startup scene is 2m if you switch to Metric scene units. Changing the scale to 0.001 will change that dimension to 2mm in the Properties panel.

Modeling in mm is most useful for 3D printing, especially if you want to upload models to Shapeways. Just keep in mind that not all the modeling tool properties in Blender will obey the Metric scene units in their parameter display, so be mindful that things like beveling should be done with a modifier, if you need precision in that regard.

Just posting to keep this thread on front page do post your tips and tricks to this thread

Thanks in advance

If you have some neat cool tips and or tricks that would benefit the forum this is the thread to post them in this thread is not a tutorial thread but for tips and information that would come in handy to new and old alike

If you have some neat cool tips and or tricks that would benefit the forum this is the thread to post them in

Hot tip!!! Blender works a lot better if your computer is turned on. )

EClark1894 posted at 6:54PM Sat, 03 June 2017 - #4306625

Hot tip!!! Blender works a lot better if your computer is turned on. )

Alrighty then never thought of that one

Since this topic still does come up often I figured it would be good for me to add this archived thread to this list of tips and tricks. This thread focus on using the mcasualsdazscripts3/teleblendforposer scripts to import from Poser to Blender there is allot of useful information that many from the community contributed to this thread but do understand this was workarounds and different tricks to get it to work and still required tweaking

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2874765

Bumping this thread back up to Sticky Status

Hi Everyone Was working with fluids lately and came across this reference and thought it may be useful to others.

IOR

Incantrix

incantrix posted at 10:32AM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318767

Hi Everyone Was working with fluids lately and came across this reference and thought it may be useful to others.

IOR

Incantrix

Thanks for sharing this

wow that's a huge list ..........is things on there I never heard off

thanks for sharing

I have to agree, and just went and bookmarked it, as it's a good reference.

Bringing this thread back to the top of the forums allot of useful info in this thread

**How to use Basic Texture Maps for Realistic Materials in Blender ** adding this one since it is sort of both tutorial and tips

Oh that looks very interesting Lobo. Thanks for posting the link.

Want to stay on top of this thread and the other so they dont disappear lol

Informative Video and article if you are interested in modeling for VR

Creating 3D Assets for Virtual Reality

New short tutorial by CG Masters

Lens Flares in Blender

Found these and thought they might be of use to the community

4 Mini Tutorials

Ohhhh, I'm especially interested in that ZBrush to Blender mini tutorial. Thanks for the link Lobo.

Miss B posted at 11:43PM Mon, 30 July 2018 - #4333938

Ohhhh, I'm especially interested in that ZBrush to Blender mini tutorial. Thanks for the link Lobo.

Your welcome Miss B those did jump out at me as well since I now have Zbrush as well

Caustics water texturing using Cycles in Blender

A written tutorial on how to create a water effects using Caustics looks very informative

Thanks Lobo. Bookmarked.

I saved it out and added to my growing tutorial list on my HD

I'll probably be adding it to my ongoing list of Blender goodies at HW.

Here is a good one which would be helpful to all Blender users

All Blender 2.8 modifiers explained

Thanks for the link Lobo, I've bookmarked it for future reference.

Great Miss B detailed tutorial on the modifiers in 2.8 looked good and sure a refresher for some of us wouldn't hurt either

OK, one of the folks in my Udemy Blender class posted a link to a YouTube video that I found interesting.

Multiple Object Edit in Blender 2.8

I had responded to someone who didn't now how to edit two objects, and I responded that it can be done by using the "Join" (Ctrl+J) command in Blender 2.79, but wasn't sure if there was another way to do it in 2.8. The OP of the thread said it worked fine and thanked me, and then someone came and posted the above link, which states you don't actually have to "Join" the objects in 2.8 in order to edit them both. I haven't watched the whole video yet. Hopefully others playing with 2.8 will find this useful.

Thanks for sharing Miss B I am subscribed to that creators channel he does many good tutorials I like many of the ones he did earlier this past year of using Blender with Substance Painter and even with 3D Coat that were good work flow tutorials

Good to know Lobo. I'll have to check out more of the videos in that Channel.

Yes they are pretty good ones

Just posting to update Sticky