Closing a hole (creating a face)

Support Basics & Interface
1

I was going through the vase tut linked from the blender site:

http://www.geocities.com/gauravnawani/tutorials/beginner/a-vase-modeling.html

and I decided I wanted to make a face on the bottom so I could have that area “closed”. I tried F, but I only had options for FGONs. I then saw under Edit/Faces the option for fill, and that seem to do what I wanted.

Can faces only be create with four vertices selected? Was that the correct way to “close” the bottom of the vase base on a circle? What exactly does “beautify fill” do? I tried it but didn’t see any obvious difference.

Thanks.

2

shift+f fills selected verticies with triangles

however, all of the selected verticies need to be connected with edges… I don’t have a pic handy but do the following

  • create a new mesh and delete all the verticies
  • go to the top view [or whatever]
  • hold control and hit LMB a few times to make some random shape
  • select everything
  • hit shift+f

notice how nothing happens

now select the first and last vert you created [they aren’t connected] and connect them by hitting F.

then select everything and hit shift+f

beauty fill [alt+f] will “rotate” the edges of the selected triangles. I can’t describe very well what it does, it’s much easier to use.

http://home.earthlink.net/~nwinters99/seldomkeys/beautyfill.png

3

Thanks for your reply.

Another problem I’m having as I follow this tutorial is that once I’m done creating the vase, the light, camera, and layer buttons have all disappeared. I have no idea where they’ve gone or how to get them back. I’ve been through this tutorial three times now to make sure I didn’t accidently press something, and the same thing happens every time.

Is there something that’s deliberately causing this, or is this some kind of bug? If I save and re-open the file (and even restart blender), everything is still missing.

This pretty much blows off the rest of the tutorial. Any clues? Thanks again.

4

Just guessing here. When you create objects on seperate layers, you can hide them. By hitting the numbers above the keyboard you can jump from layer to layer. If you lights are are layer 2, and your vase on layer 1, and you pushed layer 1 = you would only see the vase. If you hit the twurly ‘~’ above TAB you can reveal all, or hide all. Hope that helps…

5

Yeah, I’m stumped too. It’s too bad cause I like tis tutorial’s particular approach to creating this kind of object, instead of your traditional lofting approach. I wish I knew what’s doing this.

It’d be interesting if someone tried this same tutorial in blender 2.4.1 to see if they wound up in the same situtation, od if I’m just accidently continuously screwing something up.