Embarrassing blender truths

Idea is to state your stupidest, most ridiculous, or ludicrous moment that you can think of when it comes to you and blender.

I’ve had and used blender for over a year … I learned how to save a render just three days ago. That’s kind of sad. I’ve tried to before, but didn’t really care to bother looking around for more than a minute or two.

Feel free to share you stupid moments

I almost always have to look up how to have multiple materials on a single object.
I know how it should work, but I always seem to screw it up when doing it by myself.

Also, I know about 3% of Blender’s capabilities!

an object can have multiple materials/ wow you learn somthing every day

wha i can think of is my first project, it took me a week to do, i can do it now in like 15 min.

Yeah, multiple materials and parenting are my problem.

zoom in zoom out.
Impossible till i bought a mouse with scroll…

I can model a complete character, I can unfold its UVs, I can rig/skin (or almost) it but yesterday (when I wanted to explain how to do, on a forum) I didn’t even know how to create a simple glass/bottle in Blender using the spin tool :confused:
Also I still don’t know how to apply a “simple” cubic/spherical/cylindrical UV lol :stuck_out_tongue:

the first month of using blender i didn’t know there were hotkeys and so i used the mouse for rotating, scaling, and moving…which was really difficult…

I didn’t know at first, that you could load different background reference images in different 3d windows. I used to have my front view window open and load my front view background image and then I’d switch to the side view and load my side view image. I kept witching back and forth between the front view and side view loading the reference image each time. I ended up wasting a lot of time doing that.

Spec maps always give me trouble. I think no rgb has to be turned on before they work right. And I think black is up/on and white is down/off in Blender, but I am not sure. This after years of using Blender.

The last advantage Maya and other propietary packages will have on Blender will be useability/ergonomics, and if you’re in a production environment it will be worth $5000 to save the time one wastes trying to figure out/remember things in Blender.

You can do that? D’oh! I gave up after doing the same thing you described and just put the images on planes. How do you do that?

:o

If there’s one thing I’d like to change about my keyboard it’s the CapsLock key. I am forever trying to move around my model holding it down instead of the Shift key. Always thought it was ‘the stupid program’ that kept turning things around.

Best discovery - that the full stop (period) on the numeric pad zooms in and lets you have a revolve view around your object. Full stop on the main keyboard is the hot key to the 3D cursor.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/3D_View_Options#View_Menu

I’ve was still been using Taper curves till yesterday! Only then did I discovered how to use Alt + S at the nodes. That said it is a pretty new feature so I wasn’t kicking myself too much.

The day I discovered the utility of 3D texture paint after all these years was also an interesting one indeed.

Koba

Some days ago I tried for about half an our to parent two objects and always wondered why one of them was spinning when I did … until I realised that I tracked them together :eek:

When I first got it, I couldn’t save anything.

Also, I didn’t learn how to stop IK chains for ages. Had to close the program if I accidentally started one.

Ahh, back in the days of the menus hiding in the spacebar shortcut.

As a side, I could never get renders to save by hitting “render” so I always made a single frame animation. Still do, it’s so deeply ingrained.

After I’d had Blender for a little while, but didn’t really know how to use it, I decided to download a couple of meshes people had put online so I could show the program off to people. I actually downloaded the “Voyager” mesh from the Trek meshes site.
So I opened up Blender, loaded the mesh, and was showing it off. Then to one of my friends, I said “now, watch this” and pushed F12.
And promptly came up with a black screen.
I fiddled around for a bit, and finally realized I had no camera in the picture! So (it took me about a half hour to realize what was going on) I managed to insert a camera and with some fiddling moved it so that Voyager was in frame. Satisfied with this, I hit F12 again.
And again came up with a black screen.
My friend lost interest. I was actually showing him this stuff just before he had to leave. So I said my goodbyes and showed him out, and went back to Blender to try to figure out what was going on. This time it took me about an hour.
Once I learned the lesson, I never forgot it (most of you probably know what I’m going to say).
Having a camera is great, but without any light sources I was rendering a picture of total darkness!

Keith

If there’s one thing I’d like to change about my keyboard it’s the CapsLock key. I am forever trying to move around my model holding it down instead of the Shift key. Always thought it was ‘the stupid program’ that kept turning things around.

i do that allot as well, also hitting caps instead of a when trying to de select.

i uset to try to rotate the renderer!

yea I do that too… with the caplock

but I also have extra keys on the left that I can program to do different things…
one of them just makes everything minimize and the another just turns the screens off… I got freak out a few times with that thinking I lost all files…

Ah! Thank you! I was wondering why my specularity maps always looked funny. On my spec map, black is down/off and white is up/on, along with every other map setting. What made you think it was the other way?

I’m sad to say I didn’t know how to move vertices for a good amount of time.

I’m not sure one way or the other, or even if “no rgb” is necessary. I searched the wiki for “specular map” but got entries for “specular shader” instead. I’m sure the info is out there somewhere but turning it up is going to take time.