I am just going to do this in solidworks as it is one operation - select face and mirror parts - whay is this like 10 operations in blender?
Q1. Why cant I mirror on the negative axis in blender - its mirroring right back onto itself - and its supposed to be loveseat??
and my loveseat right now is eight pieces - each piece has to be mirrored individually???
Hi,
I’m not sure I understand what your question is. Perhaps it would be clearer if you included a picture.
You can certainly mirror several objects in Blender. As I’m not sure what it is you’re trying to do, I’ll just give you some hints:
In response to your questions:
Mirroring in Blender takes place about a plane. If something starts on the right hand side of the mirror, it will be duplicated to the left hand side. If it starts on the left, it will be mirrored to the right. In effect, mirroring in Blender occurs along the positive and negative axis simultaneously. This is consistent with vector and matrix operations in mathematics.
If you are using a mirror modifier (used to aid modelling symmetrical objects) and your object is mirroring back on itself, you haven’t positioned your object origin in the correct location. The mirror modifier uses the object origin as the centre of the mirror.
I don’t think this information will be of any help if you want to do this on SolidWorks though. Perhaps their customer support would be able to help?
Good luck with your loveseat.
You can select all parts with Shift key and then mirror it by Ctrl-M in Object mode and remember that effect depends on Pivot point you set as Rawpigeon wrote.
I think I’m having the same trouble. I’m trying to build an eagle and I’ve created feathers with plane meshes. Each feather is an object that I duplicated and attached along the wing. Do far it looks nice but I want to mirror the feathers to the other wing.
Isn’t there a way to do this without selecting each plane individually?
Did you read previous posts?
On your pic I see selected feathers ( if not, select any other object press H-key to hide then B-key for rectangle select or Ctrl LMB drag for lasso select and select feathers; Alt-H to restore invisible objects ) place 3d cursor at symetry axis ( as I see it’s already there ) or Shift-C to restore 0,0,0 , set pivot to 3dCursor hit Ctrl-D to duplicate and Enter or ESC to confirm duplication then Ctrl-M to mirror selected and x ( I think x is your mirror axis) Enter to confirm.
Hi,
(Edit: In other words, exactly what jawra managed to say faster than me 
Yeah I read them. I tried the suggestions and couldn’t get it to work. Here’s what it looks like when I try what you said to do. By the way Ctrl-D had no effect. I ended up using Shift-D for the duplication.
Hi,
You’re right, it’s SHIFT-D to duplicate. You need to apply rotation to your objects first (CTRL-A, 4).
Using a different object for each feather might make it difficult to work with your model, but I don’t really know because I’ve never built a bird before. Good luck with your eagle.
Ok, I haven’t leared about applying rotation to objects although I could guess what this means. I did the CTRL-A, 4 with all the feathers selected and tried the mirroring steps again. I still got the same result. Now when I try the CTRL-A, 4 again I get the following message. “Can’t apply to a multi user mesh, doing nothing.”
Ideas?
Yeah my mistake it should be Shift-D - sorry
Now I go to work and will try to post ASAP.
OK it seems like you duplicated objects by Alt-D so they have the same mesh data. If you feel the feathers have final shape and look, select all then U-key,2 to create mesh data for each object.
Now they are separate objects with own mesh data.
Ctrl-A,1 then Shift-D ( or Alt-D if you wish to edit feathers mesh later ) then ESC then Ctrl-M,x and Enter.
I think it should work now.
Well I got it so work but I’m not totally sure what I did to make it work. Once I finally got rid of the multi user error (which was another adventure), I duplicated with Alt-D then I used Ctrl-A, 1 (not 4 as previously suggested) and that mirrored perfectly.
Now it’s not truely mirrored in that all meshes are independant of each other. However, I think this will not be that much of a problem for me.
Thanks for your help!
I’m very new to 3D modelling and everything I do ends up getting redone because I learned a better way about 3/4 of the way through. This was all I could think of to be able to apply a nice UV mapping texture to each feather. As for the rest of the wings that is not feathers I will attempt to use UV mapping and bump mapping to get it to look like feathers.
Will I have trouble with this approach?
UV mapping isn’t so hard like it looks - it’s just another thing to learn.
I strongly recomend you to read Blender Wiki and Doc pages and see Blender video tuts.
I actually went through the chapter on UV mapping in the “Introducing Character Animation with Blender” book. As a supplimental I read the Blender Wiki on the subject. I even got it to work on the first model I attempted. However, I will be sure to check out the video though, thanks.
Now that I’ve gotten the mirroring thing working I was wondering about this “apply scale and rotation” option I needed to use. I’m guessing that when I duplicated the objects that new object datablocks where created but without the rotation and scaling. So it must store this scaling and rotation information in the datablocks but not apply them. Am I on the right track with this concept?
