A few newbie questions/issues

Support Basics & Interface
1

Hey guys. I’ve been learning Blender for the past few days and I have a few small problems I failed to solve by Googling (or got a partial solution leaving me only a bit less green than before).

  1. I have a major problem with “Limit selection to visible”. I found out that it’s caused by the Clip parameters, which I changed. I’m doing a retopology on a creature so I set Clip start to 0.010 to see my edges that drown a little in the mesh (but not see through the model obviously), but now I continuously keep selecting non-visible vertices from the other side of the mesh and I keep breaking stuff. Plus I cannot select parts of the wireframe with any sort of tool. Can I both see the drowning edges AND have selection restricted to visible? That’d be great.

  2. My wireframe is a bit… wry. I don’t think people manually adjust every vertex to make them line up in pretty lines, but every topology image I saw has neatly flowing lines, so I’m guessing there might be an option to even them up without messing up the general positioning. Could you point me in the right direction?

  3. When I mirror my mesh, apply the modifier, and then want to stitch the two parts together, how should I go about it? Previously I was merging vertex by vertex in Maya, but I have a feeling that a very n00bish approach, and it also seems more cumbersome in Blender, since it asks for where to merge to everytime. Or should I just find a merge-to-center option and then proceed this way?

Thank you for your help!

2

for question 1… try changing the viewport clip distances a little… 0.010 seems too low, and can cause issues with strange depth… possibly causing your problems…

if setting it to 0.1 is “too high” then your mesh is too small… scale it up and finish modelling it before scaling it back down to your required size.

for question 2… mirror it… (the edit mode has its own mirror tools so you can tweak both sides at once without needing a modifier)
as long as both sides of the mesh are the same the mirroring tools should work fine for this…
also you maywant to make use of the “slide along edge” tool … select the vert and press G , G , … this can help tweak topology without causing too much mess.

as for the third question… the mirror modifier has a “merge” option already, so you can simply apply the merged mesh and get both sides of your mirroring.