Essential Blender feedback thread...

Support Modeling
1

Hi,

I am working through “Essential Blender” and throught it would be good to collect feedback in a separate thread.

First feedback is about more explaination of how the mirroring works on ch4. Mesh Modeling/Using Modifiers.

Second feedback item is about ‘alt-right click’ to do loop select. On KDE (and other window managers) this key is reserved by the window manager… It would be good to indicate this and tell the user to configure the window manager differently.

Cheers
Erik

2

See here for the Errata http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.4/Books/Essential_Blender/Errata_corrige
The online version of Essential Blender http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.4/Books/Essential_Blender

3

Good to have the errata so I don’t report duplicate problems (like the ctrl-RMB problem).

In chapter 4 I ended up clicking the wrong two vertices, perhaps an image could be shown to show which two vertices to select before aligning them.

Also there is a short cut. Select vertex 1 and vertex 2, check that the rotaion/scaling pivot is set correctly to mediation point, and then type S to scale, followed by X0. (SZ0 for vertical scaling).

4

I am now in chapter 4 using the ‘Array Modifier’ but after applying the rotation, their appears to be a vertical (Z-axis) shift of the panel.

This happens even if I explicitly specify rotation around the Z-axis using RZ.

Also if I set count to 4 I see each subsequent panel appear a bit lower than the one before so it seems that a translation in the Z-axis is also in effect.

What am I doing wrong here?

Cheers
Erik

Edit: It does seem to work if I do Alt-G on the empty before doing any rotations. How exactly does this work? Is the initial displacement of the Empty object interpreted as a translation? If so, how can I create an Empty with non-zero Z coordinate when I am in the top-level view? I just need to understand what is happening here.

Even more information: After selecting the Empty and looking at its properties I see indeed that a newly created has a non-zero Z-coordinate but why is this non-zero when I create a new empty in the X-Y plane?