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Local TutorialBlender For the Faint Hearted - 03 : The Basics of Blender Modeling, part 1

SphynxSphynx195 Posts: 461Member
edited October 2007 in Tutorials #1
Blending for the faint hearted - Sphynx's guide to Blending

Tutorial 3: The Basics of Blender Modeling, part 1
If you've been following the first two tutorials in this series, you will have realised by now that there was not really a lot in them from the point of view of actually building models. At the end of the day however, that's not what they were intended to be. The introduction, basics of modelling and getting around Blender tutorials are all about knowing the basics on which to build - hopefully, they are a foundation that you can look back to if you really need too. More than likely however, once you start to actually use Blender, the methods shown in those tutorials should become second nature very quickly.

From now on, we'll increase the pace a little. For the most part, we'll take one specific area of Blender to look at in each tutorial. For this one, we'll be looking at the ways in which we can begin to manipulate our basic models and start to flesh them out with the mesh modelling tools.

Appending data blocks in Blender
Loading and saving Blender files is easy - its just a matter of choosing the appropriate menu item. Instead, we'll introduce Appending - the way in which we load models and other data blocks that we've built elsewhere and now want to use again.


Exercise - Appending Data Blocks
Start Blender and immediately save down your empty (yep - you read correctly - empty) Blender scene into a new file. Save it as 'Tutorial3_00.blend'. I've added the 00 on the end as we may save down a few different versions and we'll use the 00 version as a starting point for a few different exercises.

We are going to use the cube from Tutorial 2, so select the [File] > [Append] menu item and navigate to where you saved that Blender file. When you've found it - select it. You'll notice that unlike loading and saving the name does not just flash up into the filename field - in this case, it drills down into the file, as if you had chosen a directory and not a simple file name. You will notice as well, that you have '.' and '..' entries so that you can go up and down in the tree in the same way as if you were in a directory.

sb003_001.jpg
Image: Appending from a library

In a simple Blender file like the Tutorial2 file, we'll just have Camera, Mesh, Object and Scene entries and maybe one or two entries beneath them. This structure will of course get much more complex once we start to add other things to our scene. For now, what we want can be found under the 'Mesh' entry so click that (note that the data blocks that we want to append could be found in multiple areas - the cube that we want to load is both a 'Mesh' and an 'Object').

Select the Cube entry, then [Load Library].

We've not actually done anything else with the cube up until now, so this was pretty simple. Once we add materials and other things to the cube, we'll have the opportunity at this Append stage to specify exactly what we want loading and how. If you Append the cube and nothing appears by the way, that may simply be because you are on a different layer - switch layers to where you originally created the cube (the second one, if you've been following this tutorial) and it should appear.


Shortcut - Creating the cube
If you did not follow the second tutorial and want to jump in now, just start Blender, switch to Layer 2 and hit [Space]. Select [Mesh] > [Cube] to get a suitable cube for the next section.

Save the scene down again as Tutorial3_00.blend so that we have the new blender file saved with the cube in it.

Selecting Faces
For most of these tutorials, i'll be showing images with the specified object in 3D view so that it is easier to understand the tutorials. You don't need to, but for selecting some things it's an easier way to work anyway. Just ensure that you are comfortable with the Top, Front, Side and 3D (user) views and the ways in which you can move around in them so that you are looking at a view with which you are most comfortable for the job at hand.

For what we are about to do, we need to be able to select faces (polygons), rather than the points (vertices) that we already know how to select. If it is not already selected, select your cube and enter editing mode using [Tab]. You should now see the cube made up of black lines with yellow points. If all of the points that surround a face are selected, then that face is also selected - so any operations that operate on faces will affect those selected faces. This is not so obvious however, so instead we'll select directly by face.

sb003_002.jpg
Image: Selecting a face

Choose [Face select mode] in the menu bar of whichever window that you are using and the image will change. Instead of black lines and yellow spots, the image will turn to orange-lined faces with a single orange square (or handle) in the 'middle' of the face. If you turn on [Draw Normals], this is where the 'normal line' will extend from - the line that will show you what direction the face is 'pointing'.

Exercise - Selecting Everything
At the first selection of a new mesh object, Blender has a habit of selecting everything by default - we don't want that however. We want to select only the faces that we want to select. Learn the [a] shortcut therefore (press it now). This is a toggle that selects or deselects everything. Press it a few times to get used to it operating.

This 'All' keyboard shortcut is very useful and you will use it a lot. Once you have finished with whatever you have selected, just press [a] and everything will be de-selected ready for you to select what you need next.

Try this a few times as well. Select the orange square to select a face randomly (remembering that pressing [shift] while you do this will allow you to select multiple faces), then press [a] to de-select them. Repeat this randomly till you get the feel of the key.


Extruding faces
One of the most useful tools for modifying meshes is the 'Extrude' tool. Once you have selected one or more faces, it can be found on the main menu under the [Edit] menu, but it is far faster just to remember that it can be called using the [e] key.

Exercise - Trying the extrude tool
Select one face so that it becomes orange, then press [e]. Before performing any modification of the mesh, a context-menu appears asking whether you want to extrude individual faces, or the entire region. If you have only selected one face, it won't make much difference, but unless you want some strange effects, you will normally want to select [Region]. Do this now (i'll explain the other option a little later).

sb003_003.jpg
Image: The extrude context menu

The first thing that you'll notice is that four more (unselected) black squares will appear - one on each edge of the selected face. This is the most important feature of extrude, which makes it far more useful than simply as an extrusion tool.

The second thing to note is that the menu-bar of the window now reads 'D:0.000 Along faces normal'. This simple means that you have not moved the extruded face at present (D is Delta, or the distance of change). 'Along faces normal' means that by default, Blender has arranged for any movement taking place is going to be along the path of the 'normal' of the selected face.

Finally, something you may not have noticed - Blender has immediately put the face into 'Grab' mode and any movements that you make with the mouse will move the extruded face back and forth along the normal. Do this now - move the mouse back and forth and see the extruded face move back and forth from where it originally lay.

sb003_004.jpg
Image: Extruding the face

See those four new squares? See what they are now? They are the 'handles' at the middle of four new faces that attach the extruded face to where it was originally. This is important as these four faces are created as soon as you start the extrusion - regardless of what you actually do with the extrusion later.

You will be able to keep moving the extruded face until you click with the mouse-button. Do this now, and the extruded face will stop and the extrusion will be fixed. Pressing [Return] will do the same thing.


Extruding Individual Faces
Extruding individual faces will perform the same type of extrude, but each face will travel along its own personal normal. In addition, each new face will have its own set of new faces attaching it to the original location. For what we are doing here, this is not a desirable occurence, but you may want it later when you are creating your own models - it does have its uses.

Some new keyboard shortcuts
At this stage, lets introduce some new keyboard shortcuts that you'll find useful enough to use quite a bit.

First, when we did the extrusion the new face entered 'grab' mode and we were able to move it back and forth along the face normal. We can place the entire mesh (in object mode), points and faces (in edit mode) into 'grab' mode at any time by pressing [g] with the required mesh(s), point(s) or face(s) selected. In object mode, 'grabbed' meshes will turn white to show that they are selected. Move the item around with the mouse, then either click the mouse button or press [Return] to fix the item in its new position.

Have you moved the mesh, point or face and didn't really mean to, or maybe just dropped it in the wrong place? We can fix this by pressing [Escape] while we are performing the operation to cancel or abort the process. If the process has already been completed, we can undo the operation by pressing or [ctrl-z].

A special note on this however: Blender's undo feature was never the best, though it has improved in recent releases, and not all operations can be undone in the first place. If in doubt, save regularly and go back to a previous file if things go badly wrong. It's also useful when configuring your environment (as we did with the mouse-button option in the first tutorial) to set the number of undo operations to the maximum.

Exercise - Grabbing and undoing
At this point, try grabbing some points or faces (and maybe enter edit mode and select the mesh as a whole) and press [g]. Practice moving it around and dropping it. Also practice with the key to undo the last operation. Keep doing it till you are familiar with with how it works.

Once an operation is in process - such as grabbing or extruding - there are a few things that you can do to restrict the motion of the operation. When grabbing, you can press [x], [y] or [z] to restrict mouse movement in only those directions. Some operations allow you to press the key a second time so that the restriction is based upon the immediate local orientation (we'll take a look at some of these later). Try selecting a face for example, and then pressing [g] then [x] - this will grab the face but let you move it only in the [x] plane. Press [Escape] to abandon the operation and return the face to normal.

When moving an item, such as with grab, you can also hold down [alt], [shift] or [ctrl] to restrict the amount of motion taking place, such as to small, known increments such as 1.0 or 0.1 at a time. Select a face then press [g], then move the mouse with the [alt], [shift] or [ctrl] buttons held down to see what they do.

Finally, when an operation is taking place and movement has started (such as after you have pressed [g] or started to move a face that has been extruded), you can press [n]. In the same was as before, [n] allows you to enter numbers precisely. Unlike the accurate positioning of points however, this time [n] does not display a convienient 'Transform Properties' dialog. Instead, the number being changed will change on the menu-bar - so 'Dx: 0.000' will change to 'Dx: >0.000<' to indicate that numeric entry is taking place. Just start typing numbers to enter an absolute value.

Be warned however on this last key shortcut - it is not as intuitive as it seems, and can vary in use depending upon which operation you are performing. On some operations, it is next to useless while on others you don't even need to use it - you can just type the number directly (such as when scaling and rotating).

Once you are finished, reload the 'Tutorial3_00.blend' file to get back to the starting point. You can do this even more quickly by choosing [File] > [Reopen Last], or just [ctrl-o].


Making a slot in the cube
You should now know how to extrude a face, but we are not going to start with such a simple operation - we are going to use one of the extrude operations side-effects to do something a little more. We are going to perform two extrusions and a scale (or 'size') to put a slot in one side of our cube.

Exercise - A slot in the cube
Select one face of the cube and start an extrusion using [e] then select [Region]. We now have a grabbed face, but we don't actually want to do this, so immediately press [Escape]. The [Escape] key has just aborted the grab, but not the extrusion, so we still have the four new faces. The first face that we selected should still be selected.

Press the keyboard shortcut to start the 'Scale' operation. In the same way as the extrude, moving the mouse will scale the face up and down. Move the mouse till the face is maybe 75-80% of its original size, then press the mouse-button to fix it in place. Notice that you can now clearly see the four new faces that were created.

sb003_005.jpg
Image: Scaling the extrusion

Where we once had a single face on our cube, we now have five - a border around the edge, and a single face in the centre. That centre face should still be selected as we've not changed our selections in any way. Press [e] to start a new extrusion (from now on, always select [Region] unless otherwise informed) and move the face backwards 'into' the cube so that we create an 'open box' on it's side. Move the face backwards until the 'bottom' of the box is about the same thickness as the border that we created around the top.

sb003_006.jpg
Image: Creating the slot


Making an f-gon
We could just leave the box as it is, but the shape of it is perfect for demonstrating the use of f-gons. It's not really necessary in this case as our polygons are pretty straightforward - but it should be easier to see the effect in such a straightforward example.

F-Gons are created by selecting two or more existing polygons which are part of the same mesh and pressing the keyboard shortcut [f]. Note that [f] is used for a few different things, but all connected with faces. Blender knows that we want to create an f-gon in this case, because we will have already chosen some faces to work on.

Note that all of these keyboard shortcuts refer to operations on the main menu accessed by pressing [Space], and you should take a look at them just for completeness. Most of the operations are in reasonably logical places - a good many of the ones that we have looked at so far are in sub-menus off the [Edit] menu.

Exercise - Creating an f-gon
Deselect all faces by pressing [a], then select all of the faces in the border around the 'top' of the box. We can do this in two ways - the most straightforward is to select one face, then select each of the others with the [shift] key depressed.

(Note that we didn't really need to press [a] in this case - if you select something without [shift] depressed, Blender will assume that you want to deselect everything else at the same time).

sb003_007.jpg
Image: Creating an f-gon

The other way, which is far more useful when you start to work with more complex meshes, is 'Face loop select'. To use this selection method, press [Space] and then select [Select] > [Face Loop] or just use the keyboard short-cut [shift-r]. Once in this mode, move you mouse over the mesh and you should see combinations of faces light-up in yellow. This selection method is displaying faces that appear to have a logical 'loop' to them. Either press [Escape] to leave this mode, or choose the loop that you want (the border around the top of the box) and press the mouse-button to select it.

Now that you have the four faces selected, press [f] and a context menu will ask whether you are Making or Clearing the f-gon. Select [Make] and the four polygons will merge into a single face. Remember that this is a visual effect only, and the four faces still exist. If you want to revert them to normal, just choose the f-gon, press [f] and select [Clear].

sb003_008.jpg
Image: The new f-gon


Sub-dividing the cube
Before we do anything else, save down the current file as 'Tutorial3_01.blend' so that we have our box protected from anything that might go wrong from here on.

Next, put your 3D view into 'solid' mode by pressing [z]. Our box should now be displayed in the default Blender modelling-clay grey. We also want to be in 'Object mode' - if you are not, press [Tab] to get rid of any point or face selection handles. We are now going to take a look at the effects of the sub-division tools in the 'Mesh' section of the 'Editing' menu.

Can't see the slot anymore? This may simply be because you are looking at the wrong side of the box - you'll get used to the differences between Wireframe and Solid eventually. It is very easy to manipulate something in Wireframe, only to realise that you've been modifying the opposite side of the model. If this has happened, use the rotation keys to rotate the view till you can see the slot.

sb003_010.jpg
Image: Subdividing the cube

Exercise - Sub-dividing the cube
In the [Mesh] section of buttons, you should see a button marked [SubSurf] which at present is turned off. Select this button to turn it on - it's a toggle button, so it will turn on and off each time you click it. There should also be a button marked [Subdiv:1]. If the number is not 1, use the little arrow buttons to move it to 1. There should also be a drop-down menu button next to [Subsurf] that is currently marked [Catmull-Clark].

This combination of three buttons should have made a drastic difference on our cube. In fact, it should no longer be cube-shaped at all - more of a 'cup'. What has happened?

sb003_011.jpg
Image: The effect of sub-division

What has happened, is that Blender has visually (note - this is important, the geometry of the cube has not changed in any way - look at the 'edit mode' image to see that the cube is still there) smoothed out the surfaces of the cube. There are two important values to note here: the algorithm being used, and the sub-division level.

The sub-division level tells Blender how many divisions each 'real' face should be sub-divided into for the purposes of generating a smooth surface. If you look at the cube for example, you will see that a sub-division level of 1 has doubled each face of the cube once. Raise this to 2 and each face is doubled a second time, and so on and so on. Remember that this is a geometric progression. A sub-division level or 5, may mean that our cube is visually broken into thousands of faces before it is drawn. Depending upon what type of computer you have, this may drastically slow down screen refresh rates.

Blender has two algorithms that can be used in the sub-division process. The default is Catmull-Clark, though you can also select Simple Subdivision if you want to. Simple-subdivision doubles the number of surfaces as described above, but does not really modify their positions very much. If you switch over to Simple Subdivision now, and raise the sub-division level you will probably see very little change on-screen. By far the most useful for us here is the Catmull-Clark algorithm, which is why it is the Blender default. The Catmull-Clark algorithm uses the vertex position and face normals of each new virtual face created to generate as smooth a progression between the 'real' fixed points as it can. This is why our cube with a slot in the side has now changed into something more closely resembling a cup.

Exercise - Experimenting with the Subdiv level
Increase and decrease the sub-div level of the cube and see what effect it has. The maximum sub-div level in Blender is 6 - which means even a simple object such as the cube will be made up of a huge number of polygons. By the time you get to 6, you probably won't even be able to distinguish them apart.

sb003_013.jpg sb003_014.jpg sb003_015.jpg sb003_016.jpg
Image: The cube subdivided (1)
Image: The cube subdivided (2)
Image: The cube subdivided (3)
Image: The cube subdivided (4)

Notice that in these images, I have displayed the cube in edit mode and left the 'border' polygons that we converted into an f-gon selected. This will give you an idea what effect sub-division can have on just one single polygon.

When you have finished experimenting, take the sub-div level back to 1.


Smoothing the cube
We've been talking about sub-division 'smoothing' the faces, but they are not exactly 'smooth', are they? Each face is still pretty flat. There are two ways that we can actually perform proper smoothing in Blender - either by letting Blender smooth an object automatically, or by explicity telling Blender that we want an object (or individual faces) smoothed explicity. Remember as well, that you can smooth any face in Blender - it does not need to have been sub-divided first. In fact, you will probably use ordinary smoothing far more that sub-surfacing.

The first method of smoothing a face is to turn on [Auto-Smooth]. You will see this button above the sub-division buttons in the [Mesh] section. Again, this is a toggle button - clicking it repeatedly will turn Auto-Smooth on and off. The [Degr: 30] button allows you to control the maximum angle between the normals of the faces that auto-smooth will operate upon. Anything below this angle, Blender will try to smooth. Anything above, Blender will ignore.

In this case, we won't been using auto-smooth. Why? Well, first of all auto-smooth is very useful, but it makes its decisions based upon logic - and frankly, we may not always want this 'blunt-instrument' style of decision making. Secondly, and most importantly in this case, the auto-smooth angles operate on the number of degrees between the normals of the original faces - not the sub-divided ones. We could change the default maximum angle of 30, but the maximum that we can change it to is still only 80 (and this is a pretty savage change in itself). As a result, the angles of 90 degrees between our cube faces would never get smoothed.

The second method is to explicity specify that we want to smooth our cube. The two buttons that we use for this are [Set Smooth] and [Set Solid] which are in the [Links & Materials] section of this same page of menu buttons. In this case, these buttons are not toggle buttons because they can be used to set the entire object in one go, or by selectively choosing faces and then setting them smooth or solid with a fine degee of control. What is also important, is that this method does operate on the sub-divided faces.

Exercise - Smoothing the cube
In this case, we don't need to be selective - with the cube selected in object mode, just select the [Set Smooth] button. You should see an immediate change, but it will still look like an old 3rd Person shoot-em-up game - the smoothing is not perfect, but then we are smoothing between some pretty harsh angles.

sb003_017.jpg
Image: Smooting the subdivision

Increase the sub-div level to 3 or 4 to see a vast improvement.

If you want to keep this tutoral, save it now (e.g. Tutorial3_02.blend).


Speeding up redraw
In your 3D view, press [z] again to get rid of solid drawing and return to wire-frame. You should see a maze of faces that represent the sub-divided object at the sub-division level that you currently have selected. Now think of the speed at which redraw is taking place, then multiply that by the speed delay that would be occuring if you had a far, far more complex and sizeable model.

There are a number of ways that we can both tidy up the screen and increase the speed of redraw.

First, you will see two buttons in your [Mesh] section labelled [SlowerDraw] and [FasterDraw]. They do exactly what they say on the buttons by removing or increasing the levels of detail that they draw on screen. You can try them, but for this cube model they won't make that much difference. Try them again when you have a model with a few hundred thousand polygons on screen.

Next, you will see a set of buttons in this same area marked [Edges], [VertCol], [TexFace] and [Sticky]. The only one we need look at this time is [Edges], which should have a button next to it marked [Make], which will toggle to [Delete] if you select it. There is a very specific use for this button in the manipulation of creases and seams (which we'll look at later), but it also generates a lot more internal information about where edges are - as a result, the side-effect is that you will get a faster wireframe redraw taking place. Again, you won't see much imporvement in a mesh of this size.

Take a look under the [Subdiv] level button and you will see the [Optimal] button. Select this, and all of that complex polygon mesh will disappear to be replaced by a smooth set of curves. This has effectively replaced the wireframe with the most optimal curve which matches the sub-division being performed. Again, you probably won't see much improvement with the cube, but you can see how much information has been removed from the screen - this then, will significantly improve your wireframe redraws.

Finally for now, you will notice a second value next to the [SubDiv] button that we have not spoken about till now. It is pretty unobtrusive, being only a number of its own and without any label, so what is it?

This button gives a second sub-division level value which is only used during the final rendering process. You can therefore set you [SubDiv] button to be quite low, therefore increasing the speed of re-draw, but set this second button to be higher - therefore getting the improved sub-division when you come to render your images.

Other buttons in the [Mesh] section
Just for completeness, let's quickly cover some other buttons in the [Mesh] section that don't really need a detailed discussion.

Double sided
Normally, faces are single-sided with a normal which points in one direction. What this means is that if you view that face from the side of the normal, it will be solid and show all of the materials and textures that you have applied to it. View it from the other side however, and it might as well cease to exist (note that this does not mean that it is 'transparent' - it is actually totally invisible).

Selecting and then setting a face(s) to double-sided with this button means that all of the properties that you give the face will be visible from either side, regardless of which way the normal is pointing. It should be noted however, that this does not provide thickness to the face - view it from the side and it will still be infinitely thin.

No V.Normal Flip
When rendering, Blender will try to account for simple errors by flipping normals that are pointing in the wrong direction (Blender uses some logic for this, based upon faces around the offender etc) before it renders them. This feature is sometimes not desireable. Toggle this button, and the feature is therefore turned off for the selected face(s).

Decimator
The decimator tool is a method by which you can greatly reduce the number of faces in a mesh. Decimation works by trying to intelligently join faces together or otherwise changing the pattern of faces that fill a hole with a smaller number. Initially, the [Decimator] button contains the number of faces that are in the mesh (it therefore has a useful side-effect of being a quick-reference if you want a poly-count), with an [Apply] and [Cancel] button beneath.

To perform a decimation, use the arrows on either side of the button to reduce the displayed number to a smaller number. You have control of the estimated target number of faces that you want to have at the end of the decimation. Changing the number will be immediately reflected in the on screen display, but remember that at present this is visiual only - no actual removal of faces has yet taken place.

Once you are satisfied with the effects of the decimation, selecting [Apply] will make the changes permanent. Selecting [Cancel] will abort the decimation.

A word of caution about decimation: Decimation works to a different level of effectiveness on differently shaped objects. It's perfect on things like icospheres, but user-meshes can be totally devastated by the process. I would advise saving your work before performing any Decimation operations at all.

sb003_018.jpg
Image: Decimation

Exercise - Decimation
Start a new Blend and in the empty scene and add an ICOSphere using [Space] > [Mesh] > [ICOSphere]. When prompted, select a sub-division of 4. This will give a sphere with 1280 sides. Select the sphere, and play with the Decimator as described about - the more you get comfortable with how it works, the less of a surprise you'll get when you totally destroy one of your prized meshes!


Centre...
The three centre buttons, [Centre], [Centre New] and [Centre Cursor] are used to manipulate the location of the origin within a mesh. While it may often look like it is operating on the 3D view as a whole, it's not. Everything about these three buttons are about the origins position in relation to the rest of the mesh.

[Centre] is used to centre the object data back around the origin. For example, in the image below, a simple cube has been modified into a different shape - which does not actually change the position of the origin. Selecting [Centre] re-centres all of the object data so that the origin is once again the centre of the shape.
Post edited by Sphynx on

Posts

  • joek1010joek10100 Posts: 0Member
    Wow, great tutorial. It took me forever to figure out some of the most essential parts of the Blender interface (ie Smoothing, Subdivision). I could have really used such a comprehensive tutorial like this.
  • SphynxSphynx195 Posts: 461Member
    That's what we're here for ;)

    There are 7 more in this series to convert back across. One day, I'll actually finish the entire series. :D
  • strangemanstrangeman0 Posts: 0Member
    Very good. I'm beginning in 3D and i use Blender 2.41

    But look also here :

    http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro - there is a lot of informations here... must see if somebody is starting with blender (like me :D)
  • tetsujintetsujin0 Posts: 0Member
    Check your image links: The link for image #5 ("scaling the extrusion") actually linked to image #3 ("extrude context menu")

    So far the tutorials are good stuff. I was a little thrown when I realized there were so many keyboard controls based on the numpad (I don't have one) and in some cases where the tutorial told me to do something I had no idea how to do it. (I think some of this was due to different versions of Blender in the tutorial vs. on my machine)
  • SphynxSphynx195 Posts: 461Member
    Changed. :)

    Actually, these tutorials were written pre-2.37 so there a lot of changes to make. For some reason, the coders went crazy in the 2.4x releases and changed all sorts of short-cuts. Some are better, some worse.

    These tutorials will be seeing a re-vamp soon...well, when I get the time that is.
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User]2 Posts: 3Member
    Thanks for these, they've been a real boon to me as I've been taking my first faltering steps with blender.
  • tetsujintetsujin0 Posts: 0Member
    Also, regarding the early parts of this tutorial:

    1: At the beginning, the instructions are to open blender and immediately save the empty scene. More appropriately these instructions would include the intermediate step of clearing the scene (removing the cube at least) and then saving it.
    2: If you "append" the cube mesh from lesson 2, it won't appear in the scene no matter what layer you're looking at. It seems you need to append the cube object to get it in the scene.
  • SphynxSphynx195 Posts: 461Member
    1. This tutorial is tutorial 3 - the clearing of the scene was dealt with in a previous tutorial. Remember all of these tutorials are part of the same series and build on each other.

    2. Adding the cube by selecting the Mesh > Cube did work in an earlier release of Blender - there have been many changes made in the last few years, some of them not so obvious or even clear why the changes have been made.

    As I've said in only two posts above, these tutorials are from pre-2.37 - in fact, very pre2.37.
  • tetsujintetsujin0 Posts: 0Member
    Sphynx wrote: »
    1. This tutorial is tutorial 3 - the clearing of the scene was dealt with in a previous tutorial. Remember all of these tutorials are part of the same series and build on each other.

    2. Adding the cube by selecting the Mesh > Cube did work in an earlier release of Blender - there have been many changes made in the last few years, some of them not so obvious or even clear why the changes have been made.

    1: The beginning of Tutorial 3 is pretty explicit: "Start Blender and immediately save down your empty (yep - you read correctly - empty) Blender scene into a new file. Save it as 'Tutorial3_00.blend'." I just found it a bit confusing. I can't immediately save an empty scene after starting Blender, I need to clear the scene first. I read that and I was like, "So by 'empty scene' do you mean a scene with a cube in it? (How is that 'empty'? 'Default' I guess, but not 'empty'...) Or did the older version of Blender startup with an empty scene? (No, 'cause I remember an earlier part of the tutorial started up with the default cube scene) If I clear it myself, should I take away the light source and camera, too? (Apparently not, since the tutorial later on assumes the presence of the camera and light source in the scene...)" Remember that I'm just learning the ropes here. :) I think the start of Tut. 3 would be clearer if you said "Start Blender. Delete the cube, and save your empty scene..."

    2: I thought it might be a Blender version thing - but I don't know much about the changes between Blender versions - so all I can really tell you when something like that comes up is that something from the Tutorial didn't match Blender's behavior, and then rely on you to provide the correct interpretation.

    Having a lot of fun with all this, though. I'm at the point where I'm starting to feel very comfortable with the program, though I don't know where to find all the various operations yet.

    As for the append mesh thing - it seems like a mesh can't appear in a scene without an object to "house" it. From that perspective I think the current behavior makes sense. I wonder if perhaps appending "mesh" would work, if you had an object selected at the time (causing the appended mesh to appear as part of the selected object...) Seems not. I guess it just appears in the current scene's data somewhere, for use by name-reference. <shrug> I'll learn the answer to that one at some point, I guess.
  • KonvexKonvex0 Posts: 0Member
    Your tutorials are very good, and i thank you for making them, they are the best i have read. But i am using the latest version of Blender and under the "Mesh" buttons there are no such buttons as 'SubSurf' or 'Decimator', im assuming it is a version change issue, or perhaps i am missing something, could someone please clarify as to where these options are located so i can play around with them. :)
  • SphynxSphynx195 Posts: 461Member
    A lot of the thes buttons have now been moved into the 'Modifiers' list - select 'Add Modifier' and it will give you a list of the various modifiers available. Subsurface and Decimator are now in this list.

    These tutorials will be updated at some time in the near future - just time is rather pressured at present. :thumb:
  • KonvexKonvex0 Posts: 0Member
    Ah thanks mate, i'm just asking because it is a pretty major part of the tutorial, i know what its like to be pressed for time. Thanks once again for this series of tutorials and for your help. :)
  • kntLrdkntLrd0 Posts: 0Member
    This tut is awesome! thank you.
  • TheodorousTheodorous0 Posts: 0Member
    Just wanted to throw my two cents in. These tutorials are of an excellent quality and your effort is greatly appreciated. I am, as I'm sure many are, looking forward to your updates.
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