*aligning objects properly* oh dear... THE subject I totally hate to deal with in Blender... Blender is very annoying for that kind of manipulations because it has no proper 'align' functions. Say you have a table a you need to put stuff on it, precisely aligned with the top of the table.. And that's a simple situation. Now when you have a wall at some arbitrary angle and you need to add some light fixture on it things start to become more difficult. One could (and probably should) write a whole article about the various twisted tricks you have to develop to properly align objects..
Well the problem was, I have tunnels. And when I made them, in order to "open up the top" I would have had to select the top half of the mesh, the seperate the meshs. Then select the top half and move it out of the way.
Then of course when done, I would have to move the top half back in place again.
Too much work for something so simple. So doing it they way I'm doing it now, is a LOT easier. Besides, the tunnel meshes are poly faced with many faces to give them a rough look.
I know that you can do it the other way, but I just didn't see the need to break up the meshes that way, not to mention I have several tunnels connected together, so I would of had to do that many times over.
Boils down to what you are doing at the time and what you are working with also. Everyone is different, so everyone will have a different need/way of doing something I guess.
As long as you don't have to work in shaded/textured mode, using the wireframe rendering is very usefull for that kind of problem.. Also, when I work on a enclosed structure (like a house) I tend to organinse my objects on different layers denpending on how much they obstruct the view.. For instance the 1st floor and all associated objects will go on layer one, the second floor on layer too, etc.. Also if I have a sky dome or something similar it will always go on its own layer.. Managing layers is very quick with the keyboard shortcuts so it's pretty usefull. This way when I need to have a top-down view, I can get rid of the view obstructing layers to focus on what I need. When you are dealing with a single object however, like in the case of your tunnel you don't have too many options though.. If you dont' want to cut up your objects one of the only practical solutions is to use the 'Clipping Border' view. Use the alt-B shortcut, draw a square around the area you want to see and it clips all the rest away. use alt-B again to come back to the regular view. It doesn't work in all situations, but in some it can be very useful.
Clipping border can be nice for cross-sectioning things, but if you really want to "remove the roof" without actually changing your mesh, you can use the "hide verts" option. In edit mode, select the verts you don't want to see, press w, and select "Hide". The affected verts will vanish as though they had been deleted, but when you press [w]>Reveal, they will all come back. (they'll also remain visible outside of edit mode)
Live KI: 34914 MOULa KI: 23247 Gehn KI: 11588 Available Ages: TunnelDemo3, BoxAge, Odema
A trick I used in my shell was to split another 3D window have it set to the near angle you want, verify it in another 3D window. I got the near angle set in the second split 3D window by going into flymode and set the camera to the near angle I wanted.
After that it was just a simple case of watching two windows to match up the texture or object.
A trick I used to "snap" objects to the right angle, like the ladder and ladder region, both of which are not at 90 degree angles, is in the 3D window, you can change the manipulator to be local, as this pivots the manipulator according to the object centre
Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all
And just because I am currently making use of this option here's another way of doing it.
Create multiple scenes and link the extra stuff out of the way into another scene where it's easier to work on it.
As long as you leave the objects properly linked your actions are mirrored back to your main scene, then once your done it is easy to save it as a single scene again.
Say you have a table a you need to put stuff on it, precisely aligned with the top of the table.. And that's a simple situation. Now when you have a wall at some arbitrary angle and you need to add some light fixture on it things start to become more difficult.
(they'll also remain visible outside of edit mode)
