I’m a beginner in Blender and I’m currently trying to center a NASA-made model so that when I scale it up it doesn’t run away to the sides of the map. What’s the easiest way to do this? I’ve tried the shift + S menu and I can’t seen to get it to work; nothing happens either when I center the cursor or move the object to cursor.
This video from the Blender Fundementals 2.8 playlist should get you covered. It goes through the basics of using origin and 3D cursor as the pivot for scaling and rotation omong other things. I think the origin points of selected object might be disabled by default now, so you might have to enable it in the overlays dropdown at the top right section of the 3D view to easier see what is going on.
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Thank you, this helped. Now I’m trying to export the model - what’s the easiest way to export the .mdl textures as a stand-alone image so I can recompile the model elsewhere?
Not sure about mdl, never uesd it, is that some game engine spesific format maybe ? But if you imported just the model with textures embeded, I think you should be able to export the textures by themselves from the uv editor or image editor. Go to the “UV Editor” or the “Texture Paint” workspace for in the top/main menu section for instance, then you should be able to select the textures from the dropdown at the top of either the uv edior or the image editor, then save it out from the image menu in the uv or image editor if i am not mistaken …
I did some googling, and what came with the model were vertex colors. I’ve tried to figure out how to bake them to a raster texture file but I can’t find instructions anywhere that work.
I found an outside post that tells me to use the node workflow on the shader editor, which I have open now, but it doesn’t explain where exactly the vertex colors are stored so I can hook them up. I know they’re THERE because I can see them in the preview.
You can hook up the vertex colors from the Vertex Color Node (found under Add->Input->Vertex Color), if they are correctly set up as vertex colors they should be avalable from the dropdown. Somehow I think they are set up differently though if you don’t see a a vertex color node in the material imported … could they be set up as some weights or something ? is there anything in Vertex groups for instence ?
Maybe add a screenshot, of shader and model to se how things look currently…
Yeah, there’s nothing under vertex groups. Here’s what I’m looking at right now in the shading workspace:
But when I’m in layout mode, I see colors:
You can also see the transform jack is off-center, which was my original problem, although I’ve got the model itself lined up more or less on-target now.
Ahh, yeah. The diferance there is that in Layout(by default) you are not seeing textures, but in Shading you are(by default).
Under the viewport shading dropdown in the Layout mode you can change to textured mode, it is on material by default, and that will only show you the “viewport material” that is set up under “Viewport Display” in the shader properties.
If you switch it to textured you should get the same pink color wich is indicating a missing texture, is there any other files besides the model file itself ?
the difference is in the way the two “display modes” work in the 3D view, the 3D view is basicaly the same but are set up differently in the different workspaces by default .
these two “modes”
Yes, the model came with a .mtl file. I googled the format to see if there was a way I could directly convert it to a normal image format, and I couldn’t find anything. That’s why I’m trying to do it through Blender.
Ahh, mTl, then it is probably a material file. Is the model an obj file. I turned of my Blender PC for the night, but according to the documentation it should import the mtl, but i think mtl might just have the material definitions and not the textures. I might be wrong here but I think the mtl gets the textures by referencing image files. If there is image files aswell somewhere with the download you might try enabeling “image search” while importing the obj if there is some mismatch in the refferancing in the mtl file. Othervise I would sugest maybe adding a new thread with a link to the model if anyone else knows if there is somthing specific about the files from nasa. or try som eother format if they have fbx or something for instance. Sorry I cant help more right now.
That’s alright, thanks for helping me get this far.
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