following a BSOD blender tutorial

Support Modeling
1

Can anyone help me understand why I have to change the axis on an eye after mirroring it across 1 side to the other. (I figured out how to do this, but I still don’t understand why) Here is the tut I am following:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD/Introduction_to_Character_Animation/Face_and_eyes

I am a blender Newb coming from a LW and Modo background. I picked up blender to render some fur but ended up really liking the program. There are a few things I don’t understand and from my past background some of this stuff does not make sense to me.

“Mirroring the eyes across the X-axis was a useful way of making sure they were symmetrical. However, it also made the axes of the eyes different from each other. Later on when we add Track To constraints, we’ll want the axes of both the eyes to be identical (this will become clearer later).”

Why is that? I have never had to change the axis with other programs I used

Another one that throws me off is having to put the eyes in a 2nd layer. Why wouldn’t I just leave it in layer 1 and weight map the eyes?

Please don’t misunderstand these questions as complaints. I am just trying to get a better understanding for a program that does so much.

Thanks in advance, I am sure I will have more questions.

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The axis display that the author turns on for the objects show the local axis of each of the spheres. The “track to” constraint that he is setting you up for later uses the local axis of the spheres so he wants the local axis identical. The method the author uses is rather convoluted - instead of the multiple mirroring you could have mirrored in edit mode and then separated the eyes into two objects with the “p” key shortcut. Or in Object mode in the “n” key panel changed the mirrored objects x axis scale to 1 from -1. Or you could have mirrored in object mode as in the tutorial and then done a ctrl-a (size and rotation to obj data) on the mirrored sphere. The ctrl-a sets the local axis of an object to match the world axis. It is generally a good practice to do a ctrl-a on objects before using constraints and some other operations (eg. dupliverts) or you can wind up with unexpected results.

Hope this helps,
GreyBeard

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Great thanks GrayBeard!

Blender is a very cool and strong program. Just a lot to learn. Is there a Modeling tutorial you would reccomend over the animation 1 I am using?