Some newbie questions...

Support Basics & Interface
1

Firstly, I’d like to say “hello” to everyone since I am new to these forums and Blender. So, hello everybody!

I have a few newbie questions about using Blender and would appreciate some help:

  1. I can’t figure out why on some of my objects, it is placing this unclickable main vertex on them (probably where I created them, as I moved them in Edit mode later), and it causes the object to not rotate well away from in while in object mode, and I think resizing wasn’t working well either. Here is a screenshot; I have the screw highlighted in object mode:

http://img158.imageshack.us/img158/8284/screenhunter39ux.jpg
How do I get rid of it or work with it?

  1. See the mirror frame that is supposed to be wood in the picture below? Even though everything looks right to me on the materials panel, it always turns up black when i render it. I’d like to point out that I use YaFray for rendering.
    http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/4831/screenhunter67um.jpg
    http://img158.imageshack.us/img158/5046/screenhunter57uf.jpg

  2. In the image below, see how the screw tool like, made it start going towards a point? Well, I’ve had it do it really bad sometimes and have even had it do it so it goes from big to small and then out big again. It usually happens after I’ve started editing values. It would be useful to make it go to a point, but I don’t know how to make it do what I want:

http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/3769/screenhunter76to.jpg

  1. Sometimes when I am doing things like using Spin or Extrude, the shades on the faces will get all messed up. In the rendered image on question 2, if you look close, you can see one of the places it did it just below where the wine starts. I figured out how to fix it; remove the faces and then reassign the material, but it’s kind of annoying to have to do that so I’d like to know how to prevent it.

  2. When you are in edit mode and you create a new mesh, it registers it as part of the object you are on. I understand this, but I have had a few moments where I have needed to place modifiers on something that I made but then I realized that I accidentally didn’t create the new mesh in object mode, so anything I do to that object affects the new object. If I make that mistake again, how do I make the two objects into seperate objects, or am I doomed to have to recreate it?

  3. Can you not create more than one spotlight or something? My second one never shows up.

Thanks in advance!

2

For question #

  1. with the object selected in object mode press “center new” It will move the object center back to the middle of the object.

  2. yafray only accepts some image texture types, I am not sure about all the procedurals (I seldom use yafray)

  3. Well documented in the manual http://www.blender.org/documentation/htmlI/x3040.html

  4. select all the verts and press ctrl-n (recalculate normals outside) You will use this alot. Sometimes this happens if your mesh is non-manifold (an edge has more than 2 faces attached to it) or if you have verts on top of each other (w->remove doubles)

  5. select the verts (put the cursor over one vert and press “l” to select linked verts) and press “p” to separate

  6. In object mode spacebar->add->lamp->spot. If you were in edit mode and editing a mesh only mesh objects are available since it it assumed you are adding to the mesh.

GreyBeard