Since I came to Blender from Unity, up axis is Z in Blender, not Y.

Tip: Keep Backface Culling option selected (you will see it in Viewport Shading). This will avoid problems of flipped normals. This is also a nice optimization feature. Note that this will affect objects that have no thickness. Like a plane. This will also affect inside of an object. This will make the inside of an object invisible.

Also, to cancel a previous action, just hit mouse right click, right after that action.

When adding 3D curved objects like Cylinder, Cone, keep the segments as powers of 2, like 8, 16 or 32. This tends to give the best results as it holds the form and in general is easier to model. Like with 16 segments, just model on 4 segments and duplicate that on the other 12 segments.

Key Bindings

Rotation – Middle Mouse
Pan – Shift + Middle Mouse
Zoom – Ctrl + Middle Mouse (or use the Scroll Wheel)
Pie-Menu for camera (choose different orthographic views) – Tilda Key
Add new objects – Shift + a
Select an object – right mouse button click
Switch Between Object-mode and Edit-mode – Tab
Context-menu – Mouse right-click. As the name suggests, context-menu is context sensitive. For example, in Edit mode, with face selected, it will show a face contest menu.
Select a component – Mouse left click
Select/De-select multiple components – Shift + Mouse left click
Select everything (edit mode) – a
De-select everything (edit mode) – Alt + a
Grow Selection (edit mode) – Ctrl + (ctrl and then plus)
Reduce Selection (edit mode) – Ctrl – (ctrl and then minus)
Duplicate object – select object to duplicate + shift + d
Separate part of object – select part of object to separate + p
X-Ray mode – Alt + z
Wireframe mode AND X-Ray mode – Shift + z
Rendered camera view – 0 (numpad zero)
Show/Hide properties panel – n
Show/Hide tools panel – t

Movement
Move 3D cursor – shift + right-mouse click (this movement is unconstrained)
Move 3D cursor (constrained with pie-menu options) – shift + s
Move (grab) an object – g (g+x for moving along x axis..g+x+ctrl for moving along x axis with snapping.. and so on .. g+x+10 for moving 10 units along x axis) (g+shift+x for moving along everything but x axis.. and so on).
rotate an object – r (r+x for rotating along x axis..r+x+ctrl for rotating along x axis with snapping.. and so on .. r+x+23 for rotating 23 degrees along x axis) (r+shift+x for rotating along everything but x axis.. and so on)
Scale an object – s (s+x for scaling along x axis.. and so on .. s+x+5 for scaling along x axis by 5) (s+shift+x for scaling along everything but x axis.. and so on)
Isolated Select on an object (also called Local view in Blender) – numpad forward slash key (you can de-select “Frame-selected” in Keymap settings if you don’t want camera angle to change.. default behavior is to zoom in on isolated selected object)

Verts = Vertices (Vertex is a point where edges meet. vertices, vertex, vert, or point — all mean the same thing in blender)

tri = 3 vertices

poly = n vertices (where n can be any natural number equal or higher than 3 {3, 4, 5, …}

face = poly

In modeling and game industry, we generally reduce the polys to tris for consistency. Note, tris is also a special case of poly where the number of vertices is 3.

In Edit-mode you can edit the individual object i.e. you have access to the components to the object to change them.

In Object-mode, you make changes to object as a whole, like moving it. In this mode, you don’t have access to the object’s internal components.

Shader Vs Texture Vs Material

A shader conveys fundamental properties that determine how light interacts with the object. How well, for example, does it reflect, refract or transmit light and what is the primary/overall color we perceive it as. Usually applies uniformly to an object (in contrast to textures). You could say it’s the DNA of a material.

A texture is a (possibly random) pattern used to alter existing characteristics of an object+shaders in a controlled way. This may have a purely color-based effect (e.g. change overall brightness by multiplying in a monochrome gradient) but just as often affects non-color properties (e.g. control glossiness with a roughness map, using it as a mask that highlights/emphasizes some parts of the surface over others). Textures can even have a tactile/physical effect (e.g. modifying surface elevation via a displacement map).

A material is just a particular selection of shaders and textures. A container of them, if you like.

When creating a new Material, you will be mainly changing few options:

Base Color
Metallic (this most often is 1 or 0 value. 1 when its metal. 0 when its non-metal)
Roughness – (between 0 and 1) Determines how shiny the material will be. The lower the value, the more mirror like it will be.
Transmission – (between 0 and 1) Transparent or not transparent.

Also, for 99% of the cases, PrincipledBSDF shader will be just fine.

Creating objects using particle system

First choose the object on which we wish to create the particles.
Then goto “Particle Properties” in menu and hit “new”. You will be choosing either Emitter or Hair type particles. Emitter are for things like dust, which keep floating around. Hair is for particles that stay in their position.

Change origin point (pivot point) of an object

To set the origin of an object back in the middle of the object, goto Object mode, choose the object and then select the Object menu (top left, next to “Object Mode”, View, Select, Add, Object… Select Object). In the menu, choose, Object -> Set Origin -> Origin to Geometry

Anchor point during scaling

Blender has some very handy tools for determining the anchor point when scaling. An anchor point does not move during scaling.

See that Red-rectangle there…. that is the drop down menu for setting the anchor point when scaling.

Rigging for animation tips

Ensure that Rigify addon is enabled.
In object mode, Shift-A->Armature->Human(meta-rig)
Scale the meta-rig to the size of the animation model
(with the scaled meta-rig from prev step selected) Apply the scale by Ctrl-A->Scale
Enable the mirror action option (note.. this is only available in the Edit mode). You can see it in the Red-rectangle in the image.

This option is especially helpful when fitting the rig to model AND the rig is symmetrical. It will duplicate your action on one side to the other side. Saves time.
Show/Hide Skeleton Rig over geometry: This option was super useful prior to 2.80. With X-Ray mode, its not as useful but still good in some cases.

When you enable Rigify, it adds an Object-Data properties icon in the tools menu (that running person icon in red-rectangle). Inside there, under Viewport Display, you can toggle InFront setting to show/unshow the rig over all other geometry.

More Hot Tips

Local View – Numpad /
This hides everything except the selected object while still being independent from the regular Hide function, so you can for example have only one object you’re working on in one area and the whole scene in another.
Zoom to Selected – Numpad ,
Almost standard, working without it doesn’t seem very enjoyable to me. It centres the screen on the selected object or, when in Sculpt Mode, on the spot where you placed your last brush stroke.
Maximise Area – Ctrl + Space
Maximises the size of the area you’re currently hovering over. Very useful when you’ve got plenty of areas open (timeline, references, shading editor) and want to concentrate on the model itself for once.
Circle Select – C
Turns the cursor into a circle brush that lets you ‘paint’ a selection of faces, vertices or edges. This is very useful when you want to quickly isolate certain parts of the mesh for selective unwrapping or assigning vertex colours.
Grow/Shrink Selection – Ctrl + +/-
This enables you to grow (+) or shrink (-) the current face selection radially in all directions. Especially when you’re dealing with cylindrical objects, this comes in handy by being able to let you ‘wander’ the selection across the model.
Pin UV Vertex – P
When you’re in UV Edit Mode, you can pin certain vertices to let them be fixed if you unwrap the model again. Further unwraps will then consider their position. This is very useful for cleaning up UV coordinates.
Flip Brush Colours – X
This lets you switch between the two active colours in Texture or Vertex Paint Mode, just like in Photoshop. When you’re figuring out contours between two colours, this is especially useful and speeds up your work.
Free Rotate – R + R
If you’re about to place leaves or other random stuff without a particle system and want to quickly alter their rotation, just hit R twice and you can nicely rotate the object trackball-like. That way randomising becomes easier.
Walk Navigation – Shift + F (Blender 2.8: Shift + ^)
A very cool feature in Blender is the Walk Navigation that lets you move around in your scene with the camera like you would in a first-person game. You can move with the WASD keys and even jump.
Select Linked under Cursor – L
When you have separated your mesh with seams (Ctrl+E), you can select the individual islands in Face Selection mode with L while hovering over them. This makes selecting larger pieces very fast