Hello there!
I’ve used Blender for around 12 hours now in total (and before that I experienced only 6 hours with Wings3D before changing the application) so even though I think I’ve grasped a lot by experimenting myself and reading a bunch of tutorials, I still need some help with my current (and first) modeling project. I posted this in the basics section since most of my questions shouldn’t be too hard to answer.
Grouping:
First of all, I’ve been modeling teeth for my model. I made two separate cubes and placed them on one side of the gums. Now I want to group them so that when I enter edit mode, both of them become editable (when I tried the ‘create a new group’ command, it worked only in the object mode).
Mirroring
Now, when I want to mirror these teeth so that they have the same distance to the cursor set in the centre of my model (which is also mirrored from the centre), it just doesn’t seem to work. The new teeth just appear at a certain distance which makes me want to pull my hair out. The only solution I have for this at the moment (because of my lack of knowledge of Blender) is to snap the teeth to the middle, mirror them, and then start moving them to their right places. I think there is a faster way of doing this, I hope.
http://img184.imageshack.us/img184/2723/mirrorgu1.jpg
Layers
Could someone link me to a tutorial on using layers? It would really speed up my process since at the moment I have all my meshes in the same layer which makes the wireframe view terribly cluttered.
Normal mapping
I’ve found some tutorials on normal mapping but most of them just tell you how to make one - not how to apply it on the model. I’d also like to know what’s the workflow like when you first make a low poly mesh, start making it into a high-poly one and then normal map the initial base mesh.
That’s all for now, I really need those answers so that I can get on with my first 3D modeling project ever.