Jennifer's Classroom

[Nadnerb]

Uhm, if you saw orange, then you were probably doing "mark seam" and not "edge loop select". Mark seam marks a set of edges as a split point for uv unwrapping, and the marked edges show up as orange in the edit mode view. You can de-orange things by pressing ctrl-E and this time waiting for the menu and selecting "clear seam".

"Edge loop select", on the same menu, farther down, will select (yellow, normal) a series of edges based on the edge(s) that are already selected. This will usually result in it correctly selecting a circle or line of verts in a mesh after having manually selected just one edge. A great time-saver.

[Jojon]

When we just join the meshes, we simply throw them all, unnaltered into the same bucket. Then we can jump into edit mode, select a single vertice/edge/face and press ctrl-L (THIS is a timesaver) to select Linked ones. If we have a vertice on one flower petal selected, all vertices that are connected by edges to that vertice will be selected, as will all connected from those, ect, until the whole maze of interconnected vertices is selected and we wind up with all vertices making up that whole, single petal selected. If any vertices between this petal and another one had been merged, you'd have all vertices of both petals selected. This will also affect normals - that is which way the vertices are facing (however silly a concept that sounds for a unsizeable point), resulting in a smooth transition between the petals, when shaded, whereas if they are kept separate, each petal will be shaded according to their own respective curvature. Damn, I formulated that badly, but I'm late for work already...

Union, Intersect and Difference corresponds to OR AND and AND-NOT, respectively.

Union (OR) will produce a result from the *volume* occupied by ANY of the two objects, so if we have two cubes intersecting, it will still look like two cubes intersecting. However, we are only keeping keeping the outer hull of the conjoined cubes - if you look inside it, you'll notice that there is free passage between the cubes. If we had JOIN:ed the cubes, rather than OR:er them, we would simply have kept them as they were and you'd have had their walls making up a smaller box inside them.
Actually, if there is no need to go near the interecting area, in-game, simply joining means you have fewer vertices and faces and shading becomes correct (as explained above), whereas union will create a new vertex wherever edge meets surface.

Intersect (AND) will produce a result from the *volumes* occupied by BOTH objects, so if we have have two cubes intersecting, we will get a smaller box, made from the overlapping parts. Really the bit that was removed in the union operation.

Difference (AND NOT) will produce a result from the *volumes* occupied by one object, but not he other, in effect letting the latter take a bite out of the former. It is really AND, with the cutting_tool cube warped inside out, like that nice resting home for the mentally deranged in So long and thanks for all the fish, so that it is everywhere, except in the small space enclosed by its outer walls... :7

@pappou:

If you are actually making that building for use, rather than practice, I'd suggest building the parts separately:

- Make a pillar from a box, removing the end caps, which we'll never see anyway. This pillar can then be duplicated several times, to make the other ones, with subtle texture alterations to make them not too identical.

- If one can not enter the building, walls can be planes, rather than hexahedrons. Stageworks takes less wood than real houses..

- Just map that nice occluding woodwork onto a plane and then start a new object -- you can begin with a circle or something, if you like and then start moving its vertices, to trace the outline. Delete any left over vertices, then select them all and extrude perpendicularly. Then extrude again, to add the front and back faces. At the upper edge, you can probably just keep the two corners vertices and merge all the ones in between to either of them. Now just make sure the normals are facing outwards. This building element too, can simply be copied to the other openings (or used as a boolean cutting tool, should you want to). Actually (and now I'm getting even further out of scope) , if there is no need to view it up-close, I'd just keep it a simple plane and map the texture onto it, with any holes alpha-painted transparent in, you were using Photoshop, I think?It will be paper(or rather infinitly)-thin and subject to image resolution, but very easy on the GPU.


@Junee:

You could breifly try to reduce the graphics acceleration settings for Vista and see whether that helps with your Blender graphics glitches. I believe there was talk in another thread, about the storage of user files in different versions of Windows -- me, I just keep all my blend files in the .blender directory.

[pappou]

Opening up UV Face Select on left, and UV/Image Editor on the right, i got this beginning view of the Facade:

MC CtYd before Unwrap Projection 1.png (46.89 KiB) Viewed 3443 times

Then, selecting the texture in the UV/Image Editor, and pressing Open Image, i got this pasted onto the facade before i could press 'U'; after pressing 'U' i got Unwrap without a pull down menu, so i never got "project from view (bounds)":

MC CtYd Projection 1.png (103.28 KiB) Viewed 3441 times

*******************************************
EDIT
I am now absorbing Jojon's message above, which came up while i was preparing this one. His suggestion for a permanent building is to use a kit-of-parts in additive fashion.
That seems a more tedious process than doing it subtractively as i was attempting – carving pieces from the block using Boolean tactics.

However, the rule is, What Works. And subtraction is not working (for me; although that says nothing about the method itself).

Thanks again, Jojon. I guess i will just start over, and try the other way.

[Jojon]

Then, selecting the texture in the UV/Image Editor, and pressing Open Image, i got this pasted onto the facade before i could press 'U'; after pressing 'U' i got Unwrap without a pull down menu, so i never got "project from view (bounds)":

Hmm, I recall somebody else had missing unwrapping options and I hear that "UV face select" mode has been integrated into edit mode in the latest realease candidates, but still:

The unwrapping is done in the View window (which has to be in "UV face select" mode), so when you press the "U" key, the mouse pointer must be hovering over that. (over the view window that is, not the UV/image editor)

If you are unsure of where the pointer was when you tried earlier, give it another go, making sure you are within the View window borders this time. If this still doesn't help, try accessing it through the menu: Face/Unwrap UVs (the "U" key is a hotkey shortcut for that menu item).

As soon as you select an image for a face that hasn't previously been UV-mapped, it will get a default mapping, completely filling it with the entire image (as much as you CAN do that, considering our basic faces are triangular, whereas the image is rectangular).

However, the rule is, What Works. And subtraction is not working (for me; although that says nothing about the method itself).

Not only does different methods fit different people more or less well, but also the task at hand, so don't be taken aback - there may still be things you find it easier to do by chipping away. The right tool for the right job, given personal preference.

Now, if you really want to start anew, nothing prevents you from cannibalizing what you have already - you can use it as a base and add stuff, or maybe rip it apart to work on things separately. Take one of your pillars for example; if you (EDIT mode) select all its four faces and then press "Y", it will be separated from the rest of the mesh and can easily be duplicated (shift-D), without it ever leaving the logical mesh entity.

[pappou]

Is this the place to ask for advice on fixing Blender?

I was making real progress on my courtyard facade, when, POW! Blender shut down again (3d time in 2 days). But now i cannot restart it.
The thought passed by that maybe i did not have enough memory set for it [i dunno; is that a problem with Blender?].
Upon trying to get back in i find:
Blender signature error [two temp files listed]:
...........\blender.exe.mdmp
...........\appcompat.txt

So, since i cannot open it now, do i reinstall?
If so, should i uninstall first?
If so, can i do anything to protect my saved files?
If not, what then?

As if i were not having enough problems when it worked properly.

[Jennifer_P]

Is this the place to ask for advice on fixing Blender?

Well, actually, the Blender Artists forum is forum numero uno as far as Blender is concerned:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/
I'd go there for help with problems with Blender crashing.

So, since i cannot open it now, do i reinstall?

That sounds like a good first thing to try; I had to do that recently myself to fix a problem where I could only type in diacritical marks into the various fields and it seems to be working well. (I had objects and files with names like Çøääôêû! )

If so, should i uninstall first?

I would recommend that you do so.

If so, can i do anything to protect my saved files?

That's easy; just go to where you normally save your .blend files (I think this is normally in Program Files, under the folder Blender Foundation, under the folder Blender. And maybe in your .blender folder too.) and make sure they are in a secure location. I'm not sure if the .blend files would actually be erased if they were saved in the Blender folder, but hey, why risk it? If you just drag the .blend files (and any textures associated with them, if need be) somewhere else you should be able to uninstall Blender with no worries.

As if i were not having enough problems when it worked properly.

Hehe, yeah, working the bugs out how to model specific objects can get tiresome sometimes. I like to think that whenever I try something that doesn't work, I've just learned one more thing anyway and at least now I have more experience.

Well, give it a shot and tell me how it works out.

[Junee]

When we just join the meshes, we simply throw them all, unnaltered into the same bucket. Then we can jump into edit mode, select a single vertice/edge/face and press ctrl-L (THIS is a timesaver) to select Linked ones. If we have a vertice on one flower petal selected, all vertices that are connected by edges to that vertice will be selected, as will all connected from those, ect, until the whole maze of interconnected vertices is selected and we wind up with all vertices making up that whole, single petal selected. If any vertices between this petal and another one had been merged, you'd have all vertices of both petals selected. This will also affect normals - that is which way the vertices are facing (however silly a concept that sounds for a unsizeable point), resulting in a smooth transition between the petals, when shaded, whereas if they are kept separate, each petal will be shaded according to their own respective curvature. Damn, I formulated that badly, but I'm late for work already...

@Junee:

You could breifly try to reduce the graphics acceleration settings for Vista and see whether that helps with your Blender graphics glitches. I believe there was talk in another thread, about the storage of user files in different versions of Windows -- me, I just keep all my blend files in the .blender directory.

I think you just saved me some major headaches very far into the future, definitely gonna check out the ctrl-L thing and learn it.
Graphics and stuff I'll have to look into later, it's midnight now and I just forgot to write on a lab report because I got lost with this :

pelareklar.png (47.72 KiB) Viewed 3316 times

The top of it looks awful but you can't see that so it will have to wait.

1. Redo flower and check out joining meshes
2. Make hedgehog
3. Work out a nice top of the pillar thing
4. Finish lab report and study for exams (I have a feeling this should be at first place. )
Now. Sleep.

[Jennifer_P]

Mm-mm! Bee-a-uu-tiful! That's a model to be proud of.

4. Finish lab report and study for exams (I have a feeling this should be at first place.

And yes, this should be in first place. Vork harder I say! Harder!

[pappou]

I seem to have recoved from the Blender sickness (still do not know what went wrong, but the 3d re-install seemed to fix the mystery)...
but not without loss of work (maybe that is what was sick?).

Now, following Jojon's advice and 'canabalizing' the critter, i have gotten this pattern of texture pasted upon the newly separated curtain wall:

B CtYd curtain wall with Texture 1.png (133.15 KiB) Viewed 3246 times

Hooray! For two days i have not been able to save (or open) a file in Blender, so no point in doing work. Now, i hope to get back the facadal work i lost, and maybe it will be in better shape.

[Jojon]

Vork harder I say! Harder!

"Javohl, Frau Bluecher!" *thunder, panicked neighing* :9

That's indeed one fine pillar, but if it it is to be truly "clear" it will have be changed to a glass or korvspad material... :9

Good luck with your recovered Blender infestation, dr.Pappou -- wall is looking spiffy.


*digs himself deeply into his newly arrived copy of "The shadow isle", second to last in Katharine Kerr's Deverry series.. (here's hoping the author will find herself in another "Damn, I cant fit all this into a single volume" moment before turning "The silver mage" over to the publishers next spring)...*