#render school tips

Blender Quick Tip: Auto-Save

Blender is a powerful program, but it's also a little bitch finicky. It'll crash on you as often as it's able and do so with glee.

And while it's tempting to rip your hair out, set your computer on fire, and never touch it again, all hope is not lost!

If your Blender crashes or stops responding, rest assured that you don't have to start over!

Blender auto-saves periodically, and it's likely that you only lost a few seconds of work.

Next time your Blender crashes, take a deep breath and reopen it, then click File -> Recover -> Auto-save. The most recent file is your most recent auto save!

Blender Quick Tip: Purge Orphan Data

If you're anything like me, you're indecisive.

I often dress my sims in blender and try different poses and lighting and sets and accessories before I'm fully satisfied. This process tends to clog up my blender file and slows it down over time.

Lag makes it much harder to set the scene exactly how I want it, but luckily there's a fix for Blender lag!

Navigate to your Outliner and click the dropdown, select "Orphan Data"

This will show all the items you're not using! These are safe to delete.

Click "Purge", then click the section I have highlighted in blue.

You'll be left with only brushes, which is fine (I think Blender requires these to be present)

Hey! let's see if I can help with this

Unfortunately in my experience most alpha hair will do a similar thing. I find it to be less noticeable with darker hair (and luckily most of my OCs have black hair... which I should probably diversify but anyway). Even I sometimes run into this problem and can't fix it. When that happens I'll use the clone stamp tool in photoshop to get rid of it, and the smudge tool to make it look more natural.

Merging by distance is the go-to solution, but it doesn't always work. You can also subdivide the hair mesh and then I find using the "shade smooth" modifier sometimes goes a step further in cleaning it up.

Unfortunately there is no one solution, and each hair will behave differently. The best advice I can give is to default to trying the merge by distance or subdivision solutions and if those don't work, clone and smudge in your editor of choice!