Jennifer's Classroom

[Nadnerb]

Actually, you can use the cursor to look at things, and to move the orbit point around. (the point that the camera looks at) It also does in fact have to do with the cursor. As you probably know, you can move the 3D cursor about by left-clicking, and you can snap the cursor to selected objects by pressing Shift-S and selecting "Cursor -> Selection". You can also snap the 3D view center to the cursor by pressing C. In other words, when you press C, the view will "look at" the cursor.

Finally, someone mentioned finding the "Perspective" option in the "View" menu. You can toggle between perspective and orthographic view quickly by pressing numpad 5.

[Jojon]

...
You can also snap the 3D view center to the cursor by pressing C.
...

A-ha! Much obliged.

[pappou]

OK: I have to study Jojon's and Nadnerb's hints. Thank you so much for subbing for Jennifer.
Then i have to go back and rethink older information.

Meanwhile, if you see something as an obvious problem causer in these two pics, please don't hang back.

First pic on the left
is the structure of one wall of the Courtyard; it shows an arcade on ground floor and balconied walkways above it.
First pic on the right
is the actual ground floor arcade texture which i'm trying to apply.

MotherCiity CtYd 2small.png (63.46 KiB) Viewed 3187 times

http://i121.photobucket.com/albums/o206/pappou/MotherCiityCtYd2.png

Finished
this wall should look like the elevation study in

AnerHern Courtyard Facade 1 small.png (177.94 KiB) Viewed 3189 times

As it Stands
[1] The ground floor arcade (back wall) stone texture came out nicely – only problem being, it is upside down; nothing else is upside down;

[2] The upper three floors outside facade took off to do their own thing (pie wedges); and the stone walls on each upper walkway are funky;

MotherCiity CtYd 4 small.png (113.07 KiB) Viewed 3189 times

http://i121.photobucket.com/albums/o206/pappou/MotherCiityCtYd4.png

Maybe i failed to get material applied to all the objects? Would that cause the confusion?

But there are so many things i am not controlling.

Blender must be like tomatoes: It took a lot of guts for the first person to try it.

[Sophia]

Hehe I'm still here, and having fun with Blender... I am actually starting to *gasp* like Blender! The best part (to me) is to create a little something, then walk around it in Uru. I can't describe the feeling....... oh I can't wait till I am ready to actually start an age. Jojon, Jennifer and others, thanks for being so helpful. I hope to show some more soon, for now I am just trying to get the basics firmly established. I just didn`t want anybody to think I had disappeared

[Junee]

Yay Sophia! I haven't tried loading anything into Uru yet but now it sounds like I should find out how to do. It must be like how Homer felt in that episode of Simpsons where he gets lost in the 3D dimension.

Hm.. okay now I'm stuck on two things so anyone who might help me gets my total gratitude for a few days and a cookie.

First of all I skipped the porcupine thing. There are no native porcipines here as far as I know and I'm not that familiar with them. I might try a hedgehog later, I did one in clay in second grade so I have a head start on that one.

1. I was playing around with the vertex painting and went "oooh I can make a pretty flower! "

blomma.jpg (24.69 KiB) Viewed 3124 times

Looks prett harmless right? Well this is what happens if you pick it apart:

blomma_grå.jpg (24.95 KiB) Viewed 3126 times

That's not supposed to happen. Basically the paint is where it's supposed to be but the boolean things keep screwing up. I wanted it as a solid object but the stoopid union comand doesn't work properly! Is it the petals that are weird, or the center or are the shapes just not that fond of each other? Now the petal is "flat", because the painting ended up on the inside before but it made some funky things then too.

2. I started on our home assignment the pillar and I think I can't get the mountain creation tool thing to work as I thought it was intended.
As you can see the first part where the pillar gradually gains a bit more space is made from extrusions that are moved out. After having made the first one I remembered to use the.. erm.. *hops back a few pages*.. proportional edit falloff combined with scaling! So yeah I've tried that and in my head I get this image of the great zero slowly spinning around like a pen in a string making a circle solwly outlining the curve in a 3D sortof way. It's a nice image.
However I keep ending up with a conical frustum.

pelare_meh.jpg (18.92 KiB) Viewed 3125 times

What do I do to get the pretty curved line? Do I have to look at it from a certain viewpoint? I can't get it into my head how that works though, this is about how you move it, right?

[Jojon]

@pappou:

Hmm, if you jump into edit mode with that building selected, I am sure you will find that the texture slices follow the edges of triangles, where the boolean operations have subdivided the surface. It looks like you have walkways on all floors, but only the bottom one have openings in the front fascade (well, the space between the pillars) - I don't know if I see right and whether that is the way it is supposed to be, but about the UV-mapping:
I would map each section of wall individually, but to get a starting point:

- Jump into UV editing mode and press "A" to select all faces.
- Align the view parallel to the fascade.
- Select the texture in the UV/image editor window, to assign it to all the selected faces.
- Now hit "U" (in the view window) for a menu with "unwrapping" options and pick "project from view (bounds)"
Now you should have a result as if you pointed a slide projector
towards the (white) building, with the texture slotted in. If you
look at the ground-floor back wall, you'll notice that the pillars
are projected onto it as well, which I suppose might be right
enough, for the framework of the building - I'd expect a
beam between the pair...

Looking at the UV/image editor, you see all of the faces that are
currently selected in the view window. Here you can select all, or
groups of individual vertices and Grab, Scale and Rotate, etc them,
just as in any of the 3D views, minus the Z axis.

If you select just a few faces in the (UV-edit mode) view, only they
will show in the UV/image editor and only they will be affected by the
unwrap operations. This way you can map that back wall without the
pillars, should you want to, though you may find the brick pattern
on either side doesn't quite match up. You will also need to remap any
surfaces that were perpendicular to the view you just projected from.


Jennifer is bound to go through the unwrapping methods available
soon, but for now, the difference between the vanilla "project from
view" and the (bounds) one, is simply that the latter fits the
UV-map produced, so that it fills the surface of the mapped image.


@Junee:

I wouldn't bother with any of the booleans for that flower. If the petals
and the button are separate object and you want them to be a single one, just select them all and hit ctrl-J to Join them into a single mesh. They
will not share any verts, but I don't think that's really desireable anyway. :7

There are many ways to model that pillar; the most common one is actually not what we are doing here, but to make a profile curve of the pillar and rotate it around a axis, making extrusions along the path - i.e. lathe it - this is usually an automatic procedure. You could actually make such a curve and use with this method as well, as a guide, scaling each cross-section ring so that its perimeter touches the the guide. You need only extrude and scale ("E" and "S" key). Scaling is by default in all dimensions, around the centre of all selected vertices and since they are a perfect circle (well, regular polygon), there will be no distortion - scale away at heart's desire, viewed from any angle. Your conical profile will look smoother when not flat-shaded, but if you want rounder still; add more rings, to closer approximate an actual rounded curve. If you ever lose your selected ring, you can select two neighbouring vertices from it and hit ctrl-E for the edge specials menu ( a selection of frequently used stuff, like the "W" hotkey for other things ) - pick Edge loop select and you're back in business.

[Sophia]

Oooh Junee, I LOVE that flower, it is just gorgeous!!! I can just picture it in a pretty age............ I can see now what vertex painting can do, thanks for sharing!

[Jennifer_P]

Well, I've got to post quick since I'll be leaving here in a few minutes, but...

First, thanks again for helping out, Jojon. I'm learning from you too!
Second, that's a very lovely flower Junee! Just gorgeous. And to get those curves--you're on the right track with how you're expanding the bottom like that, but you need more vertices to get a curve. Right now I think (after a quick skim of you're post I hope I know what I'm talking about, heh) you have two points and a line drawn between them: /
If you want to bend that line in the center, you could add another vertex there in the middle and then you could have a line that bends like an elbow and could achieve various degrees of bendiness. And if you added another vertex to the line, then you could bend it like a finger, and achieve even more curvaceousness. And finally, if you added one hundred vertices, you could bend your line so smoothly it would be like a bow and arrow. So what you need to do is to take the area you want to make curvy and select the ring of vertices at the bottom. Extrude those a slight amount downward, click, and you'll have one vertex added to the ring of lines that you want to eventually bend. Extrude again and lay down a second layer of vertices. And then lay down a third and fourth layer. Now try scaling the bottom ring w/proportional edit falloff on (but not on too strongly, or you could get a line anyway), and you should get a nice bend. You could also try out the different types of proportional edit falloff to see what sort of bending it will give you. Well, hope I understood the problem. Lovely flower.

And, happily, I'm finally out of school!

[pappou]

I cannot imagine anyone being more primitive at Blendering than myself. Just realized from Junee's lovely flower creation that i have totally forgotten to think about 'Union'.

And from Jojon, i am wondering if i should have been using UV Editing more??

Before i stop to digest Jojon's latest generous advice, i will go ahead and post this current stage of my struggle: It came about after trying to paste the whole four story 2D wall design as texture upon the Blender image, in the previous post.

Yes, your view of it was correct, Jojon. Bottom floor is an arcaded walkway looking out upon the courtyard; upper walkways are behind railings; what you see at the side view are the ends of those corridors behind the trabeated facade; wherein the facade above ground floor has not been punctured – it is still a simple plane.

As i said, i originally intended to paste the 2D pic upon the facade so i would have a pattern from which to cut the holes. Instead, that turned into the awful pie wedges from the post above.

I am judging that earlier i did not have enough vertical posts in the trabeated system (i think 'trabeated' is what pc people mean by 'normals'? -- 'norma' being Latin for a carpenter's square) from which the verts could spring. So, i am now struggling to carve out the columns/posts in a 3D fashion, leaving them to act as pilasters just sticking out from the facade. There are different horizontals cutting into a continuous carving-out, which makes me do one small carve-out at a time.

But there is so much of Jennifer's advice that i am missing, i cannot do a simple Boolean on this facade as i did in carving out cubes.

That is the story on why i am submitting my current dilemma:
- The pic below is Edit Mode, showing the three bays from which i am carving a single floor;
- It shows three different conditions of carving, which i do not understand – one now blue, one now white, and one simply gray;
- What do these mean?
- Earlier, i forgot to add Materials to each newly created form, so i have started over trying to cover those 'Materials' bases;
- But now i am wondering if i should have been using 'Union' at some point to confirm when a Boolean form is subtracted?
[My earlier thinking was that 'Union' was for bringing pieces together; but the confusion in my blue-white-gray squares makes me wonder].

http://i121.photobucket.com/albums/o206/pappou/CtYdBld3bays2.png

I have to remind myself that i am trying to get a full bay (the space between two columns) properly carved out, floor to roof, in order to give the verts a better purchase as they subdivide the whole facade.

OK; all this is in the hands of the gods of interpretation. Now i return to digest Jojon's wisdom above. If you have already answered my questions in that post, Jojon, then no need for wasting more time on my probs; if my present post instead adds/changes your perception (or anyone's) of my dilemma, then ......?

[Junee]

Yay I got it to work! Thank you both Jojon and Jennifer. I don't quite understand how the edge loop select thingy works so if you could describe it a bit more in detail I'd be glad. (It's not necessary, just to appease my curiousness. I tried it and it made things orange. "Ooh neat.... but why??")
And if you join the meshes, is that any other difference from joining objects with their vertices? Get one answer and have two new questions hehe.

On the other hand, my dad installed something on this computer and now all my (two) save files disappeared for no apparent reason! Vista and Blender aren't really friends yet it seems. (There are some graphical issues as well, if you use menus in the window you can see the orchid pic amongst other things. Once I sat several minutes just hitting space until I had the while picture... ) So now I have to do both the flower and the pillar all over again...