Some Questions of Mine

Support Basics & Interface
#1

I have some questions looking for answers. Thank you for reading.

Blender Modelling

  1. Am I able to constrain moving a vertex (edge, face) to the XY or XZ plane rather than along a straight line?

  2. Is there a way to edit the strength of proportional falloff rather than the size?

  3. What is the deal with N-gons in other programs, don’t they mess up the subdivision (subsurfing)? How exactly do triangles mess up the mesh with subsurf? And what exactly is an F-gon?

  4. Do all dupliverts always face the same way or is there a way to introduce randomness?

Other

  1. Is there a way to delete datablocks in the Outliner/OOPS Window? Maybe because I don’t want it taking up room in the file when it is completely unlinked.

Rendering

  1. Right now there are way more options to tweak the render from the Blender Render than Yafray, right? Can editing the XML file help add extra tweaks?

  2. Yafray needs an area light?

  3. Wouldn’t the AO tab be better suited to the spot where the GI tab is for Yafray?

*Is there any sort of community like Pixeldam for the 3D world, where lots of users contribute a small part to build up a big city?

Mmmm, the questions in life.

#2

Yes, if you use the manipulator widget. SHIFT+LMB on the axis you don’t want to move in (if you want to move in the XY play, SHIFT+LMB on the Z axis).

You can select different falloff curves when you turn on proportional editing tool… but that’s about it.

An Fgon is a fake Ngon ('cause Blender doesn’t have 'em). Some people like 'em, some people don’t. Quads are best for subsurfed models.

You can have them point in a direction of the normals of the parent, but I’m pretty sure that’s about it. Of course, I’ve been wrong before

Unlinked items are not saved when you save your .blend file. Unless you specifically give a datablock a fake user, it goes away when you save. Try it. make a new mesh, delete it, save the file, and re-open it. Everything should be as expected.

Probably. I don’t use Yafray for a lot, but I know a lot of people do go in and tweak the XML output.

I’m not qualified to answer, but I don’t think so.

Maybe… but maybe not. :slight_smile:

I know they’re supposed to be doing something called Blenderville at Blender Battles.

Whew…

#3
  1. Am I able to constrain moving a vertex (edge, face) to the XY or XZ plane rather than along a straight line?

Yes, you are. After pressing G, hold down shift and press the key corresponding to the axis you want to exclude. For example, to costrain movement on XY, press G and then Shift+Z.

  1. Is there a way to edit the strength of proportional falloff rather than the size?

No, I think you can’t. By the way, what do you mean by strenght? If you want a vertex/edge/face being moved furhter, simply drag it furtherand area of the proportional falloff defines how much near vertices are affected.

  1. What is the deal with N-gons in other programs, don’t they mess up the subdivision (subsurfing)? How exactly do triangles mess up the mesh with subsurf? And what exactly is an F-gon?

Elongated triangles aren’t very good. In subdivisions, you can have them as long as they are on a flat area of a mesh (you still should try to avoid them). If you place them along a curved area, you might get bad subsurfing.

  1. Do all dupliverts always face the same way or is there a way to introduce randomness?

To apply randomness you could just make them real and use a script to apply random rotation. I’m not very good at python, but I saw something similiar done somewhere. I don’t remember the code, but I remember the passages: for all object selected, for each axis (X, Y and Z) get time from internal clock and use it as seed to create random number that will be applied as rotation.

  1. Is there a way to delete datablocks in the Outliner/OOPS Window? Maybe because I don’t want it taking up room in the file when it is completely unlinked.

Unlinked datablocks don’t even get saved, wich means that they are removed when you close your file.

I’m not sure I can answer the questions about rendering in the right way, so I’ll leave them to someone else. Hope I helped :wink: !

#4

:o Thanks for the quick and awesome answers! That about clears everything up. Although the Blenderville project seems to be in a state of uncertainty.

Not that I’m good enough yet to contribute to Blenderville. Back to working on my modeling :wink: