noob: How can I see inside a closed mesh?

Support Modeling
1

Hello everyone.

I wanted to model a room from a cube mesh, but I don’t know how to look inside id. I know blender has an option which lets you see inside meshes… but I just can’t find it. I checked all the manual pages I’ve read-but with no result.

Can you help please?

2

Press Z-key to toggle the views.

3

Hello, Welcome to Blender Artists!!

If you are trying to see inside of the cube, you will need to place your camera inside the cube, as well as position your lights there also. Not knowing how you have your scenery arranged, you might need to scale your cube up to make enough room to work in. An important step will be to select your cube, enter edit mode, and press ‘W’ to get the edit menu, and choose ‘flip normals’. Your normals should be pointing inside the cube now, so your working surfaces will be inside the cube instead of outside.

If you are just wanting to see wireframe, press "Z’ to enter wireframe mode, and press it again to exit wireframe mode. There is also an option on the header to do this in the 3d view window, it shows different draw types.

Hope that gets you started!!

Craigo:D

4

I can think of 4 (good) ways to look inside your mesh (in the modelling process … rendering the inside is another topic, see what Craigo wrote):

  • [Z] to toggle wireframe/solid drawing mode
  • Enter Edit mode [TAB], select the geometry to hide and press [H] (Hide selected) or [Shift][H] (Hide everything else) … Press [Alt][H] to show it again. This is also available in the “Mesh”->“Show/Hide Vertices” menu.
  • Use [b][Alt] + drawing a rectangle with the mouse to “clip” everything except the content of the rectangle in 3D. Use [Alt][b] again to undo that.
  • Be sure you are in perspective mod ([Numpad-5]) and zooooooom in. Not as good, but doesn’t need anything special (except the default zoom). you can re-focus the camera with [Numpad , ]EDIT: A 5. one (only in edit mode) is the “Limit selection to visible” button that behaves a bit similar to wireframe mode, and lets you edit hidden faces. One before last icon to the right.

Werner

6

Further to that, if you activate “Backface culling” in the properties panel (n key under shading), the faces which would normally obstruct the view (with normals pointing outward) will be invisible when normals face the away from your view. That might do the trick without going into wireframe mode.

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