Im new to this forum and am currently trying to work my way through Essential Blender Ch 4. page 91 working with the array modifier.
I have created a duplicate of the mesh in the tutorial and then turned off the Relative Offset button which caused the copy to disappear.
Moving on I created the Empty space and can move the pillar around as said in the book. I also clicked on the Object Offset button but nothing has happened and the copy of the pillar has not reappeared.
Im stuck trying to do trial and error but it is getting frustrating as i try to complete the pillar. I am using Blender 2.48 and if anyone has had worked their way through this any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance for any assistance.
I thought this was going to be an easy answer, but spent 1 hour trying to figure out what’s going on. I understand the relative offset causing the virtual duplicate to go away, but when I used my simple panel as the object to be duplicated and the Empty as the offset I got quite an unexpected result. Instead of the object offset like in the book and then rotating it, I got an object that was half the size and going backwards from the object. See photo.
Anybody else have this problem?
JenniferBlender: I’m willing to bet a shiny nickel that you scaled your pillar up in Object mode.
As far as I understand it, the Array modifier compares the differences between the original object and the Empty (including position, rotation and scale), and then applies those differences to each additional replica… so, if your original object was scaled up twice along the Z-axis and the Empty has its own scale unaltered, then each replica will be scaled down along the Z-axis by half.
The fix? CTRL-A -> Apply scale and rotation. This can also be avoided by doing all of your modeling in Edit mode rather than in Object mode.
I figured out what I was doing wrong. I was creating an empty mesh instead of empty space from the tool bar. When it was corrected the duplicate that disappeared, reappeared under the first when I used the rotate button. Holding down the control button while rotating did not snap the duplicate for me to 90 degrees. I figured this one out by pressing R-key and 270 to make it look like it did in the book. I also had to grab and move it the panels around using z and x axis to align it correctly.
Moving on to closing the top of the pillar the books instructions are to go into edge selection mode and hit the upper edge of the pillar, use the E-key to extrude and S-key. When I do this the S-key over rides the E-key and scales the edge of the pillar and forces me to esc because I don’t believe this is the result I am looking for.
I was able to close the box by using the extrude key and then hitting x-axis to close the pillar. Seems much simpler but its still frustrating because I feel like I am missing a key lesson here by not being able to use the Alt-M button as said in the lesson.
I will move on in this lesson by just adding a square mesh and extrude from there to add the other section to the pillar. Hope this works i suppose it’s not wrong to find alternate ways to complete this chapter. But I still feel like I am missing something hopefully I will figure it out along the way.
JenniferBlender and Spectre-7 thank you so much for trying to help and for adding to this post. I know I will get stuck again somewhere in this chapter and will add to it.
