Toggle Viewport Visibility for Child Objects

Quick Tip:  to toggle the viewport visibility of child objects in the outliner, hold Ctrl and click on the eyeball icon of the parent object.  This will toggle the visibiltiy of all the child elements as well.

In the example above, holding Ctrl and clicking on the visibility icon for Clock object caused the visibility of the HourHand and MinuteHand to be affected.

Adding Nodes - Node Pack

There are a number of custom nodes that are developed out in the community that can be used to simplify your life, or add a functionality you never had before.  One example is this NodePack by BWIDE:  https://bwide.wordpress.com/node-groups/bwide-nodepack-for-blender/

Shadows Only

There are many situations where it would be helpful to only render the shadows received upon an object rather than the whole material itself.  There is a simple way to do this within Material>Shadow section, shown below.  Simply check the Shadows Only box.

Ceramic in Cycles

A quick entry on how to create a simple ceramic material like the one shown below.

Node setup is a simple combination of a Diffuse and Glossy, with the Mix Shader Fac biased toward the Diffuse.  The effect looks most convincing when there is a distinct light source, as opposed to the scene being lit by a texture.

Note also that the Roughness of the Glossy is set to zero.

Invisible Emissive Material

In the Cycles renderer, let's assume that you want to light your scene with an emissive mesh, however, that mesh is in the way of how you want to view the scene.  Hiding the mesh will also remove the light effect, so we need to make the object invisible to the camera, but still light the scene.

With the emissive object selected, in the Object panel, under Ray Visibility, uncheck the Camera box.

Ivy Generator

This entry is an introduction to the Ivy Generator addon.  This addon is now built into the latest version (at least versions later than 2.66a).  To demonstrate this function we'll be adding the ivy vines to this marble platform of suzanne.

Retargeting BVH

This entry covers another method for incorporating Motion Capture data through a BVH file.  This method is useful for any circumstance, but is exclusively helpful when your BVH rig does not have a nice T-Pose in Edit Mode (as shown below).

This entry is a very basic summary of what is shown in this video here Video Reference

A huge database of BVH files can be found here:  MoCap Database

If you have a BVH rig with a nice T-Pose while in Edit Mode, you may want to use this approach instead  BVH Meshing