Need help with mirror modifier.

Support Modeling
1

Hi.
I’ve been trying to use the mirror modifier to clone a standard cube mesh for some time now. Each time I use it I see the number of verts doubles so i understand the mirror was made. However when i look at the outliner i see that no new mesh or anything and also i have no access to the mirror. I can’t grab it, move it or do anything with it (i don’t see it at all). So really the only thing that happens is everything doubles. I think it’s because everything is overlapped, because when i set the mirror point to the camera i can later see the mirrored mesh and use it normally. Can you please help me out.

2

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Modifiers/Mesh/Mirror

3

Just in case that link didn’t click, I figured I would throw in my 2 cents. The mirror modifier is completely controlled by the object center see the small orange dot in the middle of the attached image. Blender will copy from one side onto the other. So if all of you geometry is on one side of the object center it will copy it to the other side.

if the pre-mirrored model is the same on both sides you wont be able to see the mirror effect.

here is the way to do it:

  1. place an object into your scene

  2. TAB into edit mode

  3. select all of the geometry with the A key

  4. move the object until all of the geometry is on one side or the other.

one thing that I eventually learned is that you probably want to enable clipping once all of the geometry is restricted to one side. This will allow you to slam verts into the center of the object without overlapping, and screwing up your normals.

Attachments

upload.png1000×521 24.3 KB

4

If you just want to see what is mirrored and what is real, just go to Edit Mode. The real geometry that you can edit will show up, vertex and edges and faces, but mirrored geometry will display as a gray shadow under Solid view port display.

As for grabbing the mirror, it is a part of object so it goes where object goes.

Now if you are talking about mirror as in mirror plane, and grabbing it to move it, that is not how Blender is setup to do. Blender mirroring is done about object center, the yellow dot. So you need to move the object center around to move the mirror plane.