I don’t know why I am having a hard time getting my head around something that should be easy.
How can I see how big an object is in Blender?
Suppose I pick a mesh (I have a spiderman mesh in front of me now), how can I see how tall this spiderman is?
In the “transform” screen (right side of 3-D window) it says “Dimension x:10.7 , y: 1.5 , z:10.5” But I don’t think those are the dimensions of my spiderman, because when I change those numbers, it moves the mesh but doesn’t change the size.
Anyway, I different students of a big project are working on different scenes, characters, objects as seperate tasks and we will bring them all together. I want to get everybody working on about the right scale, but I don’t see any way in Blender of knowing whether something is 1 meter (or yard, or blender unit) or 100 meter (or yard, or blender unit) tall.
Try changing the units under the Scene panel in the properties window, and press “S” to scale an objects size (s + x/y/z to change size on different axis). And to see the size, just go to ths object panel (orange cube icon) and look under scale.
If you wanted to use feet, or have it show meters, you can simply click one of the metric/imperial buttons highlighted in the red area and you will see the change in the 3d view bar (and anywhere else dimensions are mentioned).
Or if you wanted to measure specific parts of an object, there is a ruler tool. Enable the ‘dynamic spacebar’ addon in user prefs, then in 3d view press spacebar, click search, type ‘ruler’. The bottom of 3d viewport will have the hotkeys for using it there.
The dimensions of your object is the size of the ‘bounding box’ it fits inside. It is closely related to the object’s scale, you’ll notice if you change a dimension number, the corresponding scale changes as well. Change your display mode to ‘bounding box’ and then hack those numbers, it will be clear what’s happening, especially if you are looking at it from an angle or in perspective view.
Thanks so much for the replies. Both were really helpful. Glad to know about the units buttons in the scene window, and that ruler tip was great!
It was mentionned above ; “to see the size, just go to the object panel (orange cube icon) and look under scale.” but I am getting odd results with this. I can go to that panel and see the scale, but after I do an object / apply / scale command, those numbers will all change to “1” even though the absolute size of the character mesh hasn’t changed. So I think those “scale” numbers are more of a relative number than an absolute size like I am looking for.
To simplify my question, I’ll add an illustration.
If I wanted to know how tall this guy was, in standard blender units, what would be the easiest way to find that?
I like the 3Druler from the post above, that is great! Just seems there should be an easier way to know the size of something.
Well, that advice is not entirely correct.
To see the size (of the bounding box), have a look at the right hand properties panel (N key) under “Dimensions”. Never confuse dimension and scale! The scale should (unless you’re animating an object’s size) always be at 1.000/1.000/1.000.
In this image you see the default cube primitive. From the origin it’s one Blender unit in each direction, so it is 2 Blender units (= 2 m) in length, width and height:
I’ve seen this stated in many posts, but this is not strictly true. You can equate 1 blender unit with any real world unit that you choose.
According to the Blender docs:
Blender’s default unit of measurement, the “Blender Unit”, has no real-world equivalent. The Blender unit may be taken to represent any unit you prefer or imagine.
if your making stuff for other apps
export a cube from that app at a known size (eg 1 metre )
then set your grid in blender to match
just working by eye off the grid will get you somewhere close to right
In team work Blender units are the worst case to choose. Okey, lets say one or two person like to work with that, they choose that 1 unit = 1mm. Another persons like to work with meters because they used to do so and can read dimensions correctly, so to match dimensions they have to set Scene > Units > Scale : 0.001. Okey thats fine, now dimensions are correct. Now he/she move object one meter to right > GX1…but object moves 1mm.
Well sure in blender units it’s just a number, it could be any unit of measure or none at all. But any google result will tell you 1m, and this has been repeated for years on end. So technically you are correct, but if you take into account the thousands of people who use the program-- the blender community has always regarded it as 1m. It’s always good to have a standard to work from.
This. And while it may be irrelevant for most parts of Blender if 1 BU is a metre, an inch, a millimetre or a kilometre, there is one area where it’s not: The renderer. Light distribution and effects like e. g. refraction / absorption will rely heavily on the measurements of the rendered object.
And the correlation of 1 BU = 1 m is somewhat hard-coded into Blender: If you switch the unit system from none to metric, Blender itself translates 1 BU to 1 m. And this is no simple “one to one” conversion that Blender does here on switching the unit systems, because switching to imperial units shows 3.281 ft. So I think it’s safe to stay within that guideline: 1 BU = 1 m.
Btw. for what purpose people use Blender units ? If they choose 1BU = 1m or 1inch (or whatever known standard), they cant use shorcuts like 2mm (BU 0.002), 5.3cm (BU 0.053), 1"(BU 0.0254).
