Auto-align / manual align of geometric elements

Support Basics & Interface
#1

Heya there,

Blender is cool. Way cool. I wish I could use it with more proficiency, though I’m not an artist but a programmer… Oh well :slight_smile:

Anyway, I’m trying to make an aquarium… Actually, I’m experimenting with blender since I want to make an aquarium simulator, thus possibly I’ll be using the game engine in the future… Anyway…

Since I want that effect in/between in walls of the aquarium, I’m doing it with 5 sheets of transparent glass (with a bit of refraction). My problem is with the alignment of these sheets. Suppose I make a cube, and then scale it to a rectangular solid. Then I duplicate it, mirror it, and put these on in front of the other. These will be the fron and back walls of the aquarium. Now, to make the sides, I want them to be of the exact same thick the other ones. So I duplicate the front wall, rotate it 90º, and now I must rescale and translate it so it will fit between the two already existing walls.

So, my problem is this: how do I scale the new object so it snaps to t.he edges of other objects? More simply, how can I translate a vertex so it occupies the exact same absolute position another vertex from another object it occupying?

Maybe I’m doing the wrong approach here. Maybe I should first use some boolean operations of two cubes to get an hollow aquarium, and then make new faces ans vertexes, and split the object. Or maybe there is a way (which I don’t know) to use more efficiently the grid and snap vertexes, edges and faces to arbitratry precisions of the grid… Any ideas?

The thing I envision in blender is some kind of auto-snap to objects like in recent versions of Autodesk’s AutoCAD… that would rock!

Another question… Is there any simple way to simulate surface water torbulence inside an aquarium? Maybe the new liquid system?

Thanks in advance!

Hugo Ferreira

#2

Snapping in blender is primitive compared to autocad.

To align verts from different objects:

  1. go into edit maode and select a vert and ctrl-s cursor to selection.
  2. then go into edit mode of second object select the vert to move and ctrl-s selection to cursor.

To move one object in line with a vert of another object

  1. go into edit mode of the object you want to move
  2. select the vertex you want to align and ctrl-s cursor to selection.
  3. object mode and press center cursor.
  4. edit mode of the object you want to align with
  5. select vertex and ctrl-s cursor to selection
  6. object mode and select first object ctrl-s selection to cursor.

Harder to explain than to do but still a pain. You could also try the kloputils under scripts -> wizard.

GreyBeard

#3

All 3D is an illusion, including Blender. Just depends on how you make it work. There are often too many way to achieve one effect and it comes down to what you prefer…when you know what the choices are. www.cogfilms.com has some nice water tuts you might find helpful.

With regard your aquarian, just an idea. Edit mode: SHIFT-D, ESC, Alt-S and drag mouse = watch in left bottom corner of 3-D window to count the units. This fattens or shrinks your mesh. Other idea in Edit mode: N-key to transform object, or confirm changes from original. What ever works faster for you :wink:

Enjoy!