July 18, 2008

View Properties

If you ever need to place the 3d cursor over at an exact coordinate:

View Properties window

Quite usefull if you need to get the pivot point of an object somewhere.

May 31, 2008

Pivot Points

Now it begins to get confused. There’s no way to move freely the pivont point (the pink dot) of an object, with a gizmo for example. You have to position first the 3d cursor to your liking then center the pivot to the 3d cursor. PLUS, sometimes the pivot is called “object’s origin”.

Extremely essential to this, thus, is snapping. Done through SHIFT+S. Options are clearly self-explanatory, but you have to understand what you are moving (Cursor to Selection means moving the 3d cursor to what you have currently selected, a vertex for example). After you’ve placed the cursor where you want the object’s origin to be, you use one of the following buttons:

object's origin tool location

Fortunately, you don’t have to go through all this when you want to just rotate/scale an object with a different pivot. On the pivot mode options, bellow, you can quickly change which pivot point to use:

pivots to use when, for example, with multiple objects selected

References used for this post are:

Blender Underground post by penix1 with an in-depth explanation of Blender Objects Origin
2min video tutorial from Josh (3DMacDaddy)

All this is usefull if you are going to use Mirror, because it mirrors on the object’s origin point.

And if you want to rotate the pivot, you actually have to use a script named Object/Scripts/Axis Orientation Copy.

May 25, 2008

More modeling

From Blender3dClub:

Most use keys:

G - Grab/move selected items.
S - Scale selected items.
R - Rotate selected items.
X - Delet menu. Many options.
E - Extrude a vertex, edge or face.
B - Box selected items.
B - again..  ’Paint Brush’ select items.  Mouse wheel will adjust the size of the brush.
A - Select all (Deselect all).
K - Loop cut mesh faces.
Z - Switches between ‘Solid’ and ‘Wire Frame’ views.

ALT M - Merge menu
CTRL Z - Undo.. multible times if needed.
CTRL W - Save.. like any software, it crashes sometimes so save your work often.

And the very important: N, for the transform panel (the image below is for when on OBJECT mode, edit mode transform panel is diferent).

transform panel

On the Blender manual there’s also a long list of modeling tools.

May 18, 2008

Basic modeling

TAB: changes between edit mode and object mode. Obviously, object is for whole object, edit to edit the object.

CTRL+TAB: allows to change between vertex, edge or face edition mode.

Subsurface is here:

where to find subsurface

Some extra content

  • Blender books some extensive library of books over different topics.

To read!

  • Composite Nodes
  • From release logs, plenty of good basic information and examples