I have some type in illustrator that I want to extrude in Blender, then color the front of the 3d type different from the sides. So I created an SVG of the type, converted it to mesh and extruded it.
Now I just want to select the front faces to color them differently, but neither the bounding box or circle select are picking all of them up.
(there are tons of tiny faces. when I select them and color them white, you can see that many small faces remain blue. zooming in and selecting again helps, but still misses some)
Why aren’t these tools selecting all the faces and how do I select them properly?
I have trouble selecting small faces if I have solid mode on. If you extruded them, then you could select the face loop of the extrusion, hide it, then you should be able to select all the faces in wireframe mode.
what you want to do is to clean up the mesh. step one is to get rid of edges that are too small, type W+R in editmode with everything selected. then set the distance to a greater value than what is default, but still a small value.
Gonna try and answer everyone and I’m also attaching the blend file.
Lane, no it doesnt select all the vertices.
fantomx11, I tried doing an edge selection and the edge loop stops after a few edges.
finalbarrage, I try pressing the W key at the same time as the R key and it sometimes brings up the Specials menu, or makes it all disappear.
cgstrive. Yes that actually does work in a weird way! It doesnt fill all the faces, but in the render, it renders each plane as one single color, as if the faces were all colored the same. In this situation it does solve it, but I’m afraid that might not be a solution if I was wanting to select all the faces for a UV map. So I still would like to know how to select all the faces.
NewVisitor, thanks for taking the time to do that!
cgstrive already showed me a workaround for this particular project, but I would like to know how to select the faces in the future. Can you tell me how you managed to select all the side faces?
Glad of been some help. I’m not sure what you mean as side faces, but what you could do is in Edit mode, select all > select boundry -> invert select -> delete. It will leave you similar output to Decimate>Planar (that you can also collapse).
cgstrive, by “side faces” I was replying to “NewVisitor” who posted a version of my file where he selected all the faces on the sides of the extrusion. He posted a screenshot.
For some reason, in Edit mode I do not see the “Select All by Trait” as an option. I think my version of Blender is relatively new (2.74), is this a new feature?
you should have looked at the screenshot in Post 9 once more.
I’ve draw you a big thick red Arrow.
Go into Top-View.
Tab -> Edit Mode (Face select)
Disable “Limit selection to visible” (red Arrow in Post 9)
B (Border select) -> select the Front-Faces.
STRG+I -> invers Selection
NewVisitor,
I see now. Thanks for the clarification. Yes it worked!
But I still think its weird that blender makes it so hard to select the front faces in the first place…:rolleyes:
Maybe even select similar " normal " should work …
Anyway, i was ask me… Maybe they was a specific reason to use svg in first place, but for text, you can just load any typo style in Blender and create the text directly.
NewVisitor and Lane,
Thanks guys, both of those methods worked!
Lane,
My boss designed the sign in illustrator, with his own tracking and kerning etc, I wanted to make the 3d version exactly the same. Also sometimes I import illustrator vector shapes that arent text, so it’s useful to have a solution for selecting faces in those situations.
