Keeping scale

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

I’ve recently started using blender for a few of my hobby projects, but I’m running into a bit of a problem regarding units.
Normally for work, I do architectural models - using autocad to build the model and then 3d studio max for the rendering and texturing.
I’d considered using blender to test with some of my work projects as an alternative to using 3ds, but when I import a model there doesn’t seem to be any way of keeping units consistent. I normally work in millimetres, so obviously objects of 1m long would appear as 1000 units. Blender only recognizes up to 10000, which would make the limit on coordinates for buildings quite restricted.

I can’t quite tell what’s happening when I import a 3ds model. I can’t go scaling it to constraint dimensions, as I’d lose all scaling. If I import without scaling, I can’t tell whether the dimensions have been maintained due to the limit on the 3d cursor.

If I import the model without scaling and then scale the whole thing down to 0.001 - would any dimensions be kept consistent? I need to maintain millimetre accuracy (I never go smaller than 1mm) so scaling it down so that 1mm = 0.001 blender unit would work, wouldn’t it? I’m just concerned that due to the coordinate limit, any initial unconstrained importing might have got de-scaled in some strange way.

Do I take it that the units are intended as metres to begin with?

2

Hello
Yes , blender only have blender units!! :slight_smile:
They can be whatever you want, of course!
If you have problems with view/scale you can “reset” your object to 1, with Ctrl-A keys
This will be useful if you want to use the physics engine
1 blender unit -+ 1 meter
Bye

3

If I import the model without scaling and then scale the whole thing down to 0.001 - would any dimensions be kept consistent? I need to maintain millimetre accuracy (I never go smaller than 1mm) so scaling it down so that 1mm = 0.001 blender unit would work, wouldn’t it?

Yeah, that would be fine. You only hit problems at much lower scales than that. (floating point accuracy problems)

(when moving things, try holding ctrl-shift, control constrains the position to grid points, shift makes changes the refinement, and at the min scale, that would work out as 1mm exactly for you)