How to organize your scenes in Blender - Blender Tutorial

- [Instructor] Welcome to the chapter on putting it all together. For this chapter, I want to focus on wrapping up our project, getting it ready for rendering, talking a little bit about the different render engines, color and compositing that's available to us, and then finally, rendering our animation. In this video, I want to focus on organization. Organization is crucial to ensuring that your scene will render correctly. Now, a few things from the previous chapter to this chapter that I want to talk about. First of all, as you can see, I've updated the animation quite a bit. And even when this camera was animating, I had it jump from one frame to another to make it look like a camera jump. I also employed a child of constraint. We talked a little bit about constraints in this course, and they're really great to play with, especially the child of constraint. One thing to note is that right when the influence is zero, I can animate this in any way that I want. But over one frame, the influence turns to one, and look at that. Now my camera is attached to wherever this master bone from my armature flies around. Speaking of my armature, I went ahead and went to my little running person here, and I created a whole bunch of different bone collections, and I even color-coded a bunch of the bones. So we have left side and right side, down the middle, et cetera. Let's stick to the Starfighter for a little bit. If we come over here, we can see that the Starfighter has now three different geometry nodes coming out of it. In the previous chapter, we talked about how we could duplicate these geometry nodes and attach it. I decided to add one more down the middle. We can even scale it a little bit if we want to really make it seem like it fits there. But be careful, because sometimes you might have keyframes where you don't want them. So be sure to turn off auto keyframe. And where it says scale, if you don't want this animating, you can always right-click and clear those keyframes. And don't forget, you can always come to this panel just by hitting N for numbers. Another thing I realized the geometry nodes is they have to be independent and baked. Let me show you. If you come over to your geometry nodes workspace, you can see that all of them are already baked out. Let me open this up a little bit and show you what I mean. We have three independent geometry node simulations running. From the geometry nodes tab, you could hit N, come over to node and scroll down. Now, two things need to happen. Number one, you must make sure that this is a unique name, that you don't see something that has, for example, a little two right here. If you do, you'll want to go ahead and click this button to separate it out. This was an error from the previous chapter where I realized that you actually can't bake having one set of geometry nodes. Each one has to be independent. From there, when you go over to your node tab, you can scroll down and at the bottom here, you'll see something that says bake. An interesting bug that I realized in the Blender 4 series is that even though each one of these is its own geometry nodes, even though they look the same, they're just effectively copies, they actually all bake to the same place. So I ended up having to create a custom path and then baking. So be sure you do that on your end. When you go ahead and you have all your geometry nodes set up, if you do have a simulation, set a custom path and then bake it one at a time. Okay, so that covers geometry nodes and a little bit that I did with animation to our scene. Now let's talk about the collection at the top right here. We haven't really touched much on the outliner nor have we really talked too much about collections. Effectively, a collection is just, well, a collection of objects. You could think of it as a folder or a group. One of the cool things about collections is that they can be instance or you can have objects inside multiple collections. But my favorite part is that you can right click on them and color code them. Go ahead and color code that first collection to whatever you want. And I'm going to double click on it and call it Starfighter. Right below, you'll see our armature and I'm going to double click on it and call it Starfighter_rig. And this cube, I think we could use a better name about Starfighter_GL. Now I don't want the lights and cameras and all of that inside this collection. So let's click on Scene Collection and at the top right here, click New Collection and we can call it Camera and Lights. In the future, we might have multiple lights. So let's go ahead and just make it a collection. And for good measure, color code it. Let's left click on Scene Collection and let's go ahead and make a new one and we'll call this one VFX. And we'll add our trench simulation to it. And speaking of the trench, let's come back up here again and let's make a new one. We'll just call this Background. Drag the trench into the background and you remember, this is the stroke of our initial drawing way back when. Let's go ahead and make yet another collection and we'll call this Extras. Things that we don't necessarily need. One cool thing about collections is that you can come over and turn it on but then disable it. There we go. So now we don't need to really touch it. Background, we'll make it brown. And VFX, it's going to be important that the VFX sit inside our Starfighter and I'll show you why in a second. So let's left click and drag that. So now we have a collection within a collection. Actually, let me open this up here and remember Starfighter geometry under Modifiers had a Boolean? I ended up applying that Boolean so that way everything was merged together and that spear is still there so let's left click and drag it into Extras. Okay, so now we have a really well organized outliner. Now one more cool thing. You can drag collections into your scene and instance them. Let me show you. I'm going to left click on the Starfighter, hold it and drag it into my scene and just let go. Now at first, you might not see anything so let's go ahead and hit N for numbers and you'll see that this little origin point is somewhere in deep space so let's just zero these out. As soon as I do that, you can see that there is another Starfighter on top. It's a little hard to tell so maybe just shift it over a little bit. Now an instance is effectively a copy, an exact copy of the other one but it's linked so what that means is whatever date is in that first one, it'll be there too. But the cool thing is that you can animate the instance here itself so let's go ahead and do that really quick. I don't necessarily want two Starfighters on top of each other so what I could do is just shove this one down into the ground and there you go. Now it pops up here and then right, let's say frame 140, I can hover my mouse over the letter Z or Z. Hit the I button to set a keyframe and then let's come over to say 180 and then I can drag this up a little bit and hit I. Now I'm not necessarily animating the Starfighter. I'm just animating this big old object way out into the distance here that is a reference of the entirety of the Starfighter collection. You can see that right here, it's called Starfighter and I'm just going to put .instance. Instances are really cool because they allow you to kind of duplicate a little bit more in the scene and now look how cool this is. I have an extra Starfighter and I'll move it up a little bit so we get some pretty cool composition. All right, so there you go. You've gone ahead and animated your scene a little bit by adding an instance. You've cleaned up the outliner and we talked about baking, which is really important for any kind of simulation, especially geometry node simulations. Now you're ready to move on to the next steps to prepare your scene for rendering.