I’m having a lot of difficulty getting blender to mirror object using S X/Y. For some reason nothing wants to mirror the way I expect it to. I change the origin of the objects thinking perhaps that has something to do with it, but I’ve still only got about 10% success with mirroring things. Can someone give me a run down of the process of mirroring an object? All I want to do is mirror it over a certain axis. I wish blender had this kind of fuctionality, and if it does, please tell me. I’m starting to rip out my hair and thats not good news because I’m like sampson and without my hair I can’t blenderize. Thanks yall.
Well from my personal experience, S + X works best in front view and S + Y works best in top view. But sometimes you have to try both before you get the one you want. I also never try to mirror in Edit mode, it seems to work better that way.
Hmmm…not much luck. Thankyou very much for the quick reply and the tips about which windows it works best in. Unfortunately it seems as though there’s some kind of invisible axis based on the rotation and scaling of the mesh. Thanks again for the response! Anyone else have any tips?
sigh I suppose I could try to write a python script lol.
Once in a while I have the same problem. It happenes very rarely, but it is really frustrating. I’ve found that I can usually center new, then move the dup over some, THEN s, x. That usually seems to work. If you find anything more on this, I’d love to hear it.
Let’s assume you’ve got half a head, in frontview:
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Select a few vertices in a straight, vertical line from the side that will end up to be the seam in the middle of the head.
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Shift+S -> Cur->Sel to move the cursor to the desired position
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Tab out of editmode, press ‘center cursor’ in edit button.
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Do the ‘S’ ‘X’ thingy, hands on keyboard only, throw mouse out the window before you go. Finish it off with ‘Enter’
And to clean up, join the meshes, enter editmode, select all verts, remove doubles.
The mirror function is a bit misleading.
It isn’t actually a mirroring but a scaling.
What [S] [X] does is to convert SizeX to –SizeX and therefor simulates mirroring in the YZ-plane.
and [S] [Y] converts SizeY to –SizeY and therefor simulates mirroring in the XZ-plane.
Mirroring in Object mode will use the local axis. The result often is confusing if the local axis isn’t parallel to the global axis. Meaning difficulties arise if the object was rotated before mirroring, though the function worked correct. This also causes problems in shaded mode. Because of the negative size the mirrored object will appear black instead of shaded.
Mirroring in Edit mode seems to use the global axis. And that’s why the result seems to be more predictable.
After doing the mirror you will have to do a recalc normals (ctrl n) or flip normals to get the shading right.
Holding down ctrl might help keep the scale at -1
try pressing ctrl-A (apply size/rot) before you flip…
d52477001
Thanks very much for the detailed tips everyone. I’ve only just realized that Apply Size/Rot does what it does so thankyou very much for that. I always found myself scaling things in edit mode because I hated the fact that whatever changes I made in object mode were simply simple changes to the scaling of an object, and not ACTUALLY changing its size. BUT NOW I’ve got that understood. The scaling tip for edit mode sounds good and I’ll give that a shot next time. I’ll use Apply Size/Rot because these tips solved my problem! Thankyou a bunch guys! 