# Helpful External Resources

There are many helpful guides and resources across the internet I'd love to share but I don't have the justification to just make a single page for each with just a link in it, so this is here as a list of various resources that have helped me in my processes! I'll be adding to this list over time.

## Guides

### General

**[Royal Skies (Youtube)](https://www.youtube.com/@TheRoyalSkies)** - A great Youtube channel that offers quick and useful tutorials for Blender and various short tutorials on small topics, has saved my patience on more than one occasion.

### Rigging

**[GuiltyGear Xrd Development Staff Talk: Modeling for Skinning](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1cJPmcU7WZtY3fdokR_8A3dqJdAf-9qjp/edit#slide=id.p1)** - A presentation by Arc System Work's dev team on various professional principles for "skinning" to help with weight painting and rigging overall.

**[GuiltyGear Xrd Development Staff Talk: Bone Placement Tips for Action](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1izq614duO4QbS9CKut62xixQ_FO45U2z/edit#slide=id.p26)** - A presentation by Arc System Work's dev team, goes over ideal bone placements and common mistakes for bone positions that result in odd pivots.

## Recommended Blender Addons <sup>(that aren't CATS)</sup>

**[TexTools](https://github.com/SavMartin/TexTools-Blender/releases) (Free)** - Excellent for creating good UVs, it's absurdly useful and I use it all the time. It has saved me multiple times when default Blender has failed in UV tools.

**[Abormal](https://github.com/bnpr/Abnormal) (Free)** - A tool for editing vertex normals, incredibly useful for creating precise stylized shading.

**[Retopoflow](https://github.com/CGCookie/retopoflow) (Free)** - A tool for doing retopology in Blender, is incredibly useful and high quality.

**[EdgeFlow](https://github.com/BenjaminSauder/EdgeFlow) (Free)** - Great for making nice curves among other things, I use this all the time.

**[F2 (also known as Spider Script)](https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/3.3/addons/mesh/f2.html)** **(Free)** - Incredibly useful for my style of modeling, allows you to select a single corner vertex with two connecting vertexes to create a full face. This one is included by default in Blender, no extra downloads, you just need to enable it.

(here's a gif below of me using F2 and EdgeFlow in action)

[![f2andedgeflow.webp](https://vrclibrary.com/wiki/uploads/images/gallery/2023-04/f2andedgeflow.webp)](https://vrclibrary.com/wiki/uploads/images/gallery/2023-04/f2andedgeflow.webp)

**[SKkeeper](https://github.com/smokejohn/SKkeeper) (Free)** - Allows you to keep shape keys when using modifiers such as the mirror modifier, I should heavily note that you should not entirely rely on it, it does not always work all the time.