3D Software?

[Magic04]

Posted by Four Mad Men:
Agreed Mike of Romulas, and it also in no way hurts to have a three button mouse w/ scroll wheel.

I admire everyone's work here so much that I thought I'd give it a shot myself, so I downloaded Blender over the weekend. Is a three-button mouse really necessary? I only have a two button wheel mouse.

[Four Mad Men]

The wheel is (at least on mine) also a button (the third one of which I spoke). There are keyboard equivalents to the middle mouse button (or wheel) but that can get cumbersome. Also the wheel helps when zooming and changing the scope of things like proportional editing.

[Magic04]

Thanks Four Mad Men. I did, unfortunately, find that out when messing around with the program. Currently, I'm trying to make the gingerbread man that is described in the tutorial. Right now after discovering how to use the wheel button and moving the object around in 3 dimensions, I've totally messed up the "plane" that the object is in and I can't seem to figure out how to get it back to normal. At the moment, the background grid is slicing the gingerbread man in half through his stomach.
Any thoughts on how to restore the background grid and correct orientation of the object?
Thanks again.

[Four Mad Men]

The numeric keypad comes in handy here.
5 - Switches between orthos and perspective mode.
1,3,7 - Select top, side, front
CTRL + 1,3,5 - Select bottom, (other)side, rear.
0 - Shows the camera view

If you switch to the scripts window one of the menu options will pull up a hotkey list (in version 2.34). I personally like to split the workspace into four areas:

<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><span>
...........
. . 2 .
. 1 .....
. . 3 .
...........
. 4 .
...........
</span><hr />

Area 1 - Main 3D window
Area 2 - As needed (Secondary 3D, Scripts, etc.)
Area 3 - Camera View
Area 4 - Buttons

And don't forget that even the non-3D areas can be moved and scaled as desired.

[Four Mad Men]

Here's some new for the growing list of Blender users here. Since the day that The Blender Foundation raised enough money to opensource Blender people have have wanted the edit tools updated. It was decided that the UI needed updating and some of the core needed to be refactored inorder to make code maintenance and extension easier to manage. Well that's been finished for awhile now and in addition to the constant enhancements in all other areas of Blender we are now seeing the first steps of the edit refactoring.

The testbuilds area of www.blender.org today saw a build with the first of these enhancements. Namely true edge selection (the old edge selection still selected at the vertex level and selecting say three edges of a polygon was not possible in a true sence because it ended up select the whole face), edit mode face selection (face selection was there but was a UV mapping tool and quite useless for editing), and Ngons (although the coders are calling them Fgons).

This sets the stage for alot of new features that hopefully will be ready for the late October (official) release.

The new booleans may or may not make it for October but the Python script is out there. Not the fastest thing in the world but when it get's ported to C and incorporated into Blender's edit tools that will change.

So be on the lookout for the new edit tools as well as soft body support, and a much needed reworking of how the animation system works. Some of these I'm sure are longer range but the new edit stuff should now continue coming fast and furious.

[DEWLine]

Not sure I understand even a quarter of that, and I studied the beginnings of this stuff in my Animation school's computer lab.

Still, I think I'm going to fiddle with Blender for fun for a while myself...

[Kieran]

What a great thread this is. I'm gonna try blender, at least for now.

Thanks for all the info.

[V\'ger]

Does anybody know of any free programs that can render .3ds and are easy to use? I seem to have misplaced my Asymetrix 3d/fx 2.0 program--looking for something similar.

[Etched]

I'm going to ask what is probably a really dumb question. I have Blender and I want to be able to export objects from Blender to other programs, preferably in obj or 3ds format.

How do I do this ?

I know this has something to do with Python scripts, but I'm something of a techno dyslexic so please explain it in very simple terms using very small words.

I'd really appreciate any help anyone can give me.

[Four Mad Men]

Select the object you wish to export then using the menu select File -> Export. The sub menu at this point will show all the export types that Blender supports.

[Etched]

^ I know that much. I have no problem importing/exporting files between other 3d software. The problem I'm having with Blender is that none of the options for exporting are working.

If I try to save using the VRML, DXF, Videoscape or STL formats which it is supposed to support it just says it cannot save in that format, and all the other file formats need python scripts.

So, I'm stuck with a model I want to export into Bryce, but I am unable to do so.

[Four Mad Men]

That's odd because the export for VRML, DXF, Videoscape, and STL are native to Blender (and as you say, the rest use Python scripts). I infact used the DXF export today and it worked fine. So the only thing I can guess is some sort of hardware and/or software issue. I suppose you might try a re-install or testing with a very low poly mesh to see if you can get that exported.

[Etched]

That's odd because the export for VRML, DXF, Videoscape, and STL are native to Blender.

I know, but everytime I try to use them I get an error message, I've come to the conclusion that there is some kind of glitch in the software. I guess I'll have to re-install it.

Thanks for trying to help anyway.

[Warped9]

I don't know if there are any Mac users here. But if so is anyone familiar with Cinama 4D and/or Pixels3D programs? I, too, am looking into trying my hand at 3d modeling.

Presently Blender and Lightwave seem to be the alternatives otherwise for me.

[path_rw]

Instead of starting a new thread, I'm just tacking my question onto here. How are you putting your models into space? Are you doing that in the 3D modelling program or are you exporting it into another format and editing it in a photo editing program?