A Few Questions...

Support Basics & Interface
1

Hello everybody, I’m new here, and relatively new to Blender. As with just about any newbie, I have a few questions about the Blender interface and tools. I’m not sure if these are available or not, but if they aren’t, maybe someone could direct me to the correct forum for suggestions. Thanks, and here they are:

1). Moving object centers. Can it be done? It would make sense to have a feature of this sort, but I’ve been unable to discover how, if it is possible.

2). Snapping to grid. I’m not sure if the flaw is in my preferences, but when I snap to the grid, instead of aligning the object centers directly with the lines, Blender seems to move the object one unit in any x-y-z direction.

3.) Booleans operations. This seems to be a sketchy process with me, often leaving unwanted vertices in strange places. The effect is vertex-spikes poking off of the area operated on. What’s going on?

4). Extensive creation parameters. This, to the extent of my knowledge, is not in Blender, but oh well, I’m posting it anyway. This is the idea that, when creating, say, a sphere, your could not only set surface divisions, but radius as well. Or, if one was creating a cone, one could choose the base radius, the height and the axis it was directed along. These are just a few examples.

5). Floating transform info box. This is the idea that, when using a transform widget, assume the translate widget, and moving in virtual space, a box would appear next to you cursor telling you the distance you’ve translated (moved) it, and this would be editable information (for more precise movement). When scaling, information would be in percent, and rotation would use degrees. Does Blender have such a thing?

Thanks for reading, and a big hello to all of you in the forum community!

Axar

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Q1 - look ar http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Pivot_Points

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  1. There are two ways to move the object center. a) in object mode, select and Grab the object and move your mouse. This moves the object center and its vertices. b) to change the “center of gravity” of an object, in edit mode, select all vertices and Grab them and move your mouse. This moves the vertices without moving the object center, thus moving the center relative to mesh.
  2. There is, but it is not an intrusive step-by-step you have to do A before you can do B wizard kind of thing. Experience shows that experienced users find that dialog just gets in the way and they always start with the defaults anyway. We users prefer doing it when we want, how we want, in the order that best suits the situation. In Blender, you first position your cursor to where you want the object center, create the basic object, setting, for some objects like a sphere, specifying its resolution. Then you use your different views to Scale the object in the xyz space. Then you fine-tune the location of it. Then you iteratively refine it.
    Cones are tubes with the one end’s vertices scaled to zero with doubles removed. You change its height by scaling in the Z axis, and change its base by scaling the base vertices from top view
  3. Press N with the object selected in object mode.You can change many parameters here, and it is floating. N is universal and displays the the properties of almost anything in any window.
    njoy using Blender!
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  1. Right now (in 2.42a) if you want to snap object centers to grid it is a several step operation : In Object Mode
    Move the cursor to where you want (LMB) . Shift-S and select Cursor to Grid .
    Select the object you want to snap to grid . Shift-S and select Selection to Cursor .

Apparently the new up coming release (2.43) is to have better snapping options but I haven’t tried myself .

  1. Yes the boolean operations are not very good . Most people just stay away from using them . But also in the next release I think I read that there was some work trying to improve them .

  2. Yes . There is a real time set of numbers at the lower left corner of the 3D window that shows you the xyz coordinates as you move them, the degrees when you rotate and the xyz percentage (from a 1.0 value) . Otherwise like Roger said you can use the Transform Properties box to input transformations manually .

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Or you could just do: Shift-S -> Selection to Grid

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  1. I can’t think of much reasons for moving object centers. The only one I could think of is if you want to rotate your object around another so you have to move the object center of the object you want to rotate to the center of the object you wish to rotate around.

If that is so, then Blender already provide that feature for you. We use the 3D cursor instead. In the 3D viewport header, you can change the pivot point to use the 3D cursor or other options. This will alow you to rotate your object around another one.

  1. Actually, if you want Blender to only snap to grid in one direction, say the X axis, you select your object, press G > X then hold Ctrl and start moving. You can do the same for the other two axis as well.

  2. I never used Booleans since it gives really messy meshes in Blender. Only thing I see Booleans are useful for are engravements or emboss with text. The rest are done with bump maps.

  3. Yeah, just to add to RogerWicker’s comment. Blender is fast and I like it that way. Having a menu to stop me when I want to add a sphere is getting in the way. Besides, you can translate, rotate and scale by typing with your keyboard, more effecient for me that way.

  4. RogerWickers already answered that.

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Well maybe not moving them from the center of the object, but it sure is handy for moving them back to the centre of the object. :evilgrin:

Mike

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Well that’s what the 2.43 “center new” button is for - moving the object center to the center or a bunch of selected vertices.

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Ooh! I am liking the prospect of that!

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Exactly :evilgrin:

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Okay, thanks for the replies! You answered some lingering questions that I had about various problems which have irked me since the beinning of time :yes: .
Gracias!

axar

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Um, center new is different in 243? I have that button in 242 already …

Also, re . . . #5 I think: Aside from N, you can just type numbers when you see numbers in the status bar. Like if you hit S and then .5 you’ll scale something by half in all dimensions. If you only want to scale it by Z you can hit S Z .5 or S 1 TAB 1 TAB .5 (if you use TAB it starts treating it as seperate value cells in a dialog box).

It’s a little finiky and isn’t super nice about backspacing all the way, but it works if you want presice relative movements. “ALT-D R X 120” twice will give you a nice triliniar set of something without going and using duplifoo, for example.

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yeah, it’s been there for a while… I’m not sure what Wolf is on about.

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I’ve only recently first discovered it in the 2.43 release. I always pressed the Center button in the Mesh Tools 1 panel. Never knew there was Center New button 2.42 due to the placement of the “Center” button in 2.42 in the Mesh Tools 1 panel in 2.42 and that in 2.43 that button was removed since there’s already a “Center” button in the Mesh panel. Then I saw the Center new button.

:smiley:

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Yeah, I found that a day or two ago.

Ooh, thanks!