Favorite Blender buttons!

[Frawmusl]

Wanted to get another thread going just to have some fun with the creators here in the mesh forum :P 
What is your favorite blender button/key combination? Post it (And how to use it if its a bit weird)!

I love love love Shift+spacebar. If you split your screen a lot and have multiple views hover over one view, IE the 3d view and hit shift+spacebar and it will maximize that view until you hit **bleep**+Spacebar again. Helps when editing UV maps, Full screen moving around your object and marking seams, Then full screen placement of UVs without having to collapse either of them into the other! wooo!

 

ETA: Seems I missed an H there... Owell :)

[Codewarrior Congrejo]

Actually i only use it with keystrokes / shortcuts.
Typing is still so much faster then moving your mouse over the UI to reach a certain point in the menu or the floaters / panels. Therefore they all have the same importance to me : )

But here are the ones i apparently 'use' the most:

L for select all linked i could say i am glad about the existance of this keystroke  ^^
E for extrude
CTRL+R for manually adding a loopcut
K for the Knife tool
ALT+M+L for Merging at 'Last' - i keep sticking to last, and also select the vertices in that order so the last one will be the target - makes it easier in bigger builds when you have to clean up topology in odd faceloops to not break the flow of the geometry by merging once at first, then at last and so on
Y and V for Splitting and Ripping Vertices
CTRL+N for recalcing the Normals
B to draw a selection border
P for pinning UVs and also here L for selecting Islands (except when sync selection is active)
1,3,7 / CTRL+1, CTRL+3, CTRL7 (and 5 to toggle between Ortho and Persp.)  because i like to work in exact  non distorted views for better accuracy.

Another thing i like a lot is for editing animations -  That in the Dopesheet View, a rightclick above a colum of keys at a certain frame wil select all of them at once - very handy for fast deletion or copy/paste actions.

And last but not least the spacebar is the most valueable shortcut, because it enables you by typing just a few letters to get to every needed functionality - provided you know all their names, that is ; )

[Sassy Romano]

Top right corner, X

It means this pain session has just ended

[Aquila Kytori]

My favourite is the tilde key which i have set up to "repeat last action" ( I find the SHIFT + R ) to awkward . Its perfect for those repeated ALT+M +L  moments

 

                       

And not really a key combination but I love the simple one click to open folders and files .

[Rahkis Andel]

Spacebar has to be the winner since it has everything in one button and can teach you shortcuts you don't already have memorized...

But other than that, here are my favorites in no particular order:

[ctrl+B] (Bevel): This function and the one below replaces a lot of different edge flipping/knifing shenanigans I used to have to go through to reroute topology before B-mesh was released.

[ctrl + I] (Inset face): Same as above.

Sculpt Mode: In the past, I would roughly model my shapes out and smooth them with [W -> Smooth], then expand them with [alt + S] to scale selected along normal z axis to get back some of the volume lost by smoothing. Now I can do the same thing, except with better precision and while maintaining more details with a few brush strokes.

[G -> G] (Slide selected edges/vertices): I was really happy when they added this new shortcut. Now, instead of having to go through menus to get to edge slide (or making your own key bindings -- I'm too lazy) you just double-tap G. Better yet, you can slide individual vertices the same way.

[J] (Join vertices): It took a long time to teach myself to stop using [f] (Fill face) for everything, but it was worth the confusion. Now whenever I find myself in a tough topology situation and I just need to start from a blank slate, i can use [X -> Dissolve Edge] to convert the troubled area to a big n-gon and  join verts until I'm happy. Better yet, J now goes THROUGH edges. If you select 2 verts, J will now cut a vertex through any edges that get in the way, making it a bit like a more primative knife. No more having to go through the clunky process of subdividing edges or using the touchy knife tool just to add a few vertices to join to.

Last But not least [F] (Fill face): Due to the above tool, I don't use F as much anymore, but due to the F2 addon, it's now an incredibly powerful tool. In a nutshell it allows you to quickly fill consecutive faces by just tapping F repeatedly (or holding it), where in the past you would have to select each area you wanted to fill one quad at a time. Since it's detailed usage is somewhat hard to explain considering how simple the tool itself is, I'd recommend just googling "F2 addon".

[Frawmusl]

So many buttons mentioned! 

Another Favorite of mine is (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+C) I think its one of the more complex shortcuts, and its really helpful too Allows you to reset geometrys origin to cursor/active/geometry or geometry to origin. Really helpful if you're working with pesky modifiers that you need to move your origin somewhere (IE Cursor to center (Shift+C) And then (Ctrl+shift+alt+c) origin to 3d cursor = mirror )

[Nacy Nightfire]

Lots of these already listed I use all the time.  I'll add:

ALT B -  for quickly slicing a cross section of geometry to be visible which lets you get into tight areas and tweak things.

SHIFT B - to box select an area to center and focus on.  

Also CTL SPACEBAR to toggle widget on and off and

CTL ALT Spacebar to quickly set up a custom orientation

ALT O to select Proportional Editing constrained to Connected Geometry along with Shift O to toggle thru the influence styles of proportial editing .

In UV edit mode I use:

ALT A - to scalel uv islands proportionally

ALT P - sends all uv islands scattered around to be contained within the UV grid area in a non-overlapped fashion.

 

[Rahkis Andel]

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Nacy Nightfire wrote:

CTL ALT Spacebar to quickly set up a custom orientation

 

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I knew this thread would come in handy. Thanks for the tip -- That's one I didn't know of that will save time.

 

[Nacy Nightfire]

Rather then setting up a seperate, but similar Blender related thread, I hope it's ok to add some custom keys that I have set up that I find very useful (hopefully this will be ok with you Frawmusl).

I set up keys 1, 2, 3 to coorespond with selection types vert, edges, faces. For a great tutorial on setting up these custom keys I've included the link below.  

http://cgcookie.com/blender/2010/05/17/custom-hot-keys/

Additionally, since I use snapping all the time, I set up keys for all the snapping types (increment, verts, edges, faces, volume). You'll find some info on this on the following thread.  I'm on a Mac which leaves the CMD key free for all sorts of personalized keys.  I use CMD I, CMD V, CMD E, CMD, F and CMD O (increment, vert, edges, faces, vOlume)

http://www.elysiun.com/forum/showthread.php?294060-Custom-shortcut-from-2-65-does-not-work-in-2-67

 

 If you are new to setting up custom keys I recommend watching the Blender Cookie video mentioned first.