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That's another issue. The tab key is on the left side of the keybard, also away from my right hand's normal position over the calculator keys. Tabbing into and out of edit requires hand movement, which breaks my concentration. Lately I've been using the on-screen drop-up, which still requires a mental concentration "hiccup".
Yes, this is the key to learning it.
Okay, I've been procrastinating all morning. It's time to close the browsers and go do battle with the cockroaches palmetto bugs that have created a vast and overpopulated kingdom in the garage. It's time for rapid depopulation in the kingdom, with the killing field littered with them all laying on their backs with their legs up in the air. I wonder if they have folk songs about the mysterious "cloud of supine death" that comes for them every couple years? I'm thinking Gordon Lightfoot's style in his song, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald"...(song) Back later!
This is true, it does just move to the right mouse button. However, the real issue I've seen both personally and through others commenting what they saw teaching others is that once the 3D Cursor is moved to the offhand mouse button, it gets forgotten and it's harder to get people to start using it. It becomes instead something they just see as constantly in the way. My impression is that in the case where it is still on the main button it is seen as something that will be of use at some point and so people stay open to when they will actually use it, whereas when it's moved to the off button, it's forgotten other then when it's visually in the way and at that point people build up a subconscious resistence to it that when the time comes to actually start using it can be tough to overcome. Again, just my experienence and reading comments in forums.
You might want to remap your main shortcuts to your right hand since it's that much of an issue for you. You can create/save the default and your own key mappings using the import/export buttons conveniently located on the same tabbed page as where you change them. Just remember to create a cheetsheet for yourself if you do that.
Actually, I have thought that I'm probably not the first lefty to use Blender.
Doing training now so not interested in changing any key mappings until I'm mostly done with tutorials. But then I'll probably look for some mappings that other lefties have already created; they may have already thought of other efficiencies that I'm not yet aware of. The wheel is a pretty good design. No need for me to remake it.
Okay, I'm ready for battle! If I find one big enough to ride, I'll capture him and put a saddle on him and teach him to canter. Have a good day everybody...
You think you are being fair and honest, and that is good; but if she is charging more, then which of you is giving the customer what he or she wants?
Both of you. You feel you would be ripping folks off by charging more, but that isn't really your call; customers decide if its too much. :)
And there is nothing wrong with having a two-tier pricing structure.
Having switched over to right mouse select after fighting against it for so long, I still didn't want my 3d cursor to accidentally get moved about. I added Ctrl & Alt modifiers to the left mouse (or pen touch) so that any spurious click (or pen touch) wouldn't just reposition my 3d cursor. I move it when I need to, but otherwise I keep the left click (pen touch) open for gesture scripts. It's great that the interface can be configured to many different ways of working so long as the basic principles are understood. You wouldn't want to go reassigning things without knowing ahead of time whether it could impact something else important.
This is a great set of tutorials, and Darrin takes you through the whole process of creating the character as well uv mapping, etc.
Something to keep in mind, using DAZ doesn't mean we're chained to DAZ's available render engines. Take a look at this Cycles Demoreel 2015 to see what an alternative can do. It's a fun video.
Why one more render engine when 3dlight is built in and Cycles does great photorealistic work (among other things?) Well, Blender's nodal texture environment is very powerful and well developed with plugins, tutorials, etc... playing in that will give transferable skills for environments like IRay. The compositing environment is also very nice. Finally, it works with Blender's built in features like instancing for painting the landscape with grass, flowers..., physics (including wind) for those clothes, plants, trees, sails, etc... A well developed animation environment. Freestyle, a built in NPR render engine...
When learning anything, repeated exercises can help us get concepts down and make them second nature. If we find a tutorial we like that works through a series of tasks we want to be efficient at, don't just do it once and put it aside. Look for and pick out some tutorials like this to repeat, over and over until we get fast, until the methods, shortcuts, etc... become second nature and we could do them in our sleep. Things to keep in mind when picking these types of tutorials are:
Document how well we did at the beginning and again at the end of a series of practice sessions (however many times is appropriate for our tempermant for that tutorial/set of skills) and put the tutorial aside for a few months.
After a good waiting period, take the tutorial out, dust it off, and do another run, document and compare to the end of the first session. We will usually find we are rusty and aren't as efficient as we were at the end of the last session. Do another quick session. We should find it's much quicker and easier/less work to get back up to speed.
If we do this 3x with time inbetween, we will often find that after the third session we have mastered that set of skills (assuming we sized it right) and the skills have become second nature to the point that if we didn't use them at all for over a year, a simple cheetsheet would have us back to full speed on those skills.
From my years as an educator, this is one part of a process that I've found to be most efficient for most people at mastering a set of skills, concepts, etc... and a big part of that is not just repetition, but repetition with down time along with understanding that this downtime is necessary for the skills or concepts to 'sink in.'
Yes, that's a great tutorial series on painting in Blender, probably the best I've seen. He also has a starter tutorial set to ramp up into this series Intro to Blender UV Mapping. That particular series (the one Chris mentioned) is part of a larger character creation series that goes from modeling through rigging. The full series can be found here.
I do that right after I carefully place my 3D Cursor to some snap point and it gets frustrating afer about the 5th time. It's very easy to do with a pen/tablet. ;)
There is a user preference that is worth mentioning that many people in their tutorials will at some point recommend and that is 'rotate around selection.' If we go to "File/User Preferences" then look on the "Interface" tab we should find this checkbox. It's worth trying out to see which works better for you (on or off.) Another is on the "Input" tab, "continuous grab" which allows for continuous panning, etc.. when we reach a border.
Thank you Cris. I did see those but wasn't sure about how in depth he went. I guess I'll watch those tomorrow morning... :-)
WOW... Darrin has a wonderful and clear voice. I'm a total fan already! Great first tutorial on UV mapping.... Thanks guys!
...I think I mentioned that I already have a copy of Blender for Dummies (paid 24.95$ for it) and evne after reading through it, every time I open the programme up and see that same UI (which doesn't respond the same as in other CG software), I still feel totally lost. I don't think in keystrokes and key combinations when it comes to creating graphics as I used to draw & paint. Hence, based on that perspective, I find using a clean, elegant, pointer driven UI (like Hexagon's) to be so much more intuitive as it doesn't "get in the way" of the process for learning modelling.
As to Carrara, I do have it but can never seem to get the modelling tab's screen to work right. All I seem to get is the "thumbnail" view down in the right lower corner.
Again, the reason I ike Hexagon's concept, is that it is totally dedicated to the task of modelling without all the other distracting features that programmes such as Blender, Carrara, and even the "pro" applications include.
The next version (2.76) of Blender is coming out and brings some nice changes. There are two of particular note:
For a review of the new features check out Plasmasolutions new video. For those not familiar with Plasmasolutions, it's Thomas Beck's channel which posts videos each new release as to what the new features will be. If you use Blender it's worth subscribing to.
Another thing to note about Blender shortcuts that help is that if there are well established shortcuts for a given type of action, Blender will often use those, so that the shortcuts are cross application applicable. Now I'm not saying that Blender will mimic Maya or 3DS Max. But it will do more then the standard ctl+c, ctl+v, ctl+z type.
An example of this is when using circle select, the sculpt tool, paint tool, proportional editing, or any tool that uses the circle/brush type of cursor, the left bracket '[' and right bracket ']' will increase/decrease the circle size. For those familiar with Photoshop, it uses the same shortcuts.This follows a convention by many applications now to try to mimic shortcuts across applications as much as possible to maximize their usefulness and minimize the learning curve.
Shortcuts are developing into a bit of a secondary language of sorts.
One of the shortcut key combinations that are advanced but one finds needing to use quite a bit at some point is to move the origin point of a mesh. I found this hard to remember as it required using all three of the modifier keys with the c (cursor) key. For some reason I had a resistance to remembering the 'all three modifiers' part. It finally fell into place when someone posted 'fist mash' + c. Since then, remembering any combination that requires all three modifiers has become easier as I simply remember 'fist mash' + whatever key.
On a related note, I had mentioned before that we often want to place the 3D cursor, then use that to either rotate an object around or reposition the origin of (an) object(s.) The tricky part of this is remembering that moving the 3D Cursor is part of the 'snap' menu and the key combination is shift+s (snap.) A common snap point for the cursor is 'cursor to center' which will re-center it back to the origin point. One can also reposition the 3D Cursor by using the 'n' key to pop up the numeric panel in the 3D Viewport and entering x/y/z values in the section for the 3D Cursor but this I find less useful as one rarely knows the exact x/y/z coordinates in my experience, snapping is usually more useful.
** And as always, my mentioning of shortcuts does not preclude using menus for anyone who prefers them. I simply post these tips for anyone who finds shortcuts useful and would like them to be easier.
You are a wealth of information Gedd. Thanks for all your posts!
It's good to know when it may be helping someone. ;)
Here's a tip for kit bashing...
One of the basic functions of kit bashing is to 'cut and sew' meshes. It would be natural to reach for the delete key to cut apart a mesh and fill to glue the mesh together, but that is often not what we want. The delete function in Blender gives us a whole menu of options (which we want to be familiar with each) but in all cases the delete menu will change the mesh fundamentally. Likewise the fill menu will add geometry, which we may not want.
Enter the 'rip' and 'merge' functions. Basically, these two functions act as a cut and sew type of feature in Blender. If in a basic Blender scene we add (shift+a) a mesh (any mesh) then with that mesh selected go into edit mode (tab/edit) then select a vertice or set of vertices and rip them apart (v) we will have an opening. Now, with two of the separate vertices selected (can only do 2 at a time) merge (alt+m) them back together, we can stitch the seam back together. Note, this type of action does require redoing any uv maps and redoing textures, but in many cases now we can get away with a simple glass, metal, procedural, etc shader on some objects and in these cases its a minor issue.
So, in summary, rip (v) and sew (merge... alt+m)
Another tip for newer modelers that is handy for kit bashing is that we don't need to have a single mesh per object. We can have an object that is made up of multiple parts. This works especially well if we are creating something like a piston that has multiple cylinders. Each part of the cylinder can be a separate mesh, selectable, but easy to add it's own shader too, and all can be part of a single object. The main problem we have when using separate meshes on a single object is when those parts are supposed to have one continuous surface. At that point, we may want to take the time to stitch the parts together. Also, if parts are going to need to move independantly we may want to keep them as separate objects and parent them but if they are going to be static or moved as a unit, joining them into a single object will often simplify our work environment. We can still select the separate parts (meshes) of an object using the L (linked) key to assign shaders etc...
Another advantage of having a single object made up of multiple meshes vs separate objects is that Blender will only let us go into edit mode with one object at a time. If the separate meshes are part of a single object, we can move between them while in edit mode. If they are separate objects, we need to go out of edit mode, select the next mesh/object and go back into edit mode, back and forth.. to modify the parts.
A good rule of thumb for a single object with multiple meshes is if it would be a single object in the real world made up of separate parts such as a candle with wax and wick, it's a good candidate for a multiple mesh object.
Many of the tips I present here are the same with any content creation tool btw. ;)
Yea I'm watching a presentation from ZBrush channel talking about kit bashing and what not.... fun stuff.
zBrush with their brushes and retopo tool is a kit bashers dream. ;)
A common problem we run into when working in a content creation tool to modify things is complexity. It may be a scene with multiple objects or it may be a complex object. Trying to get to the specific object or part of the object can often be tricky, and while wire mode can help, sometimes that just looks like a million overlapping lines that are hard to discern which are which.
This problem is actually two separate problems, one being a scene with many objects and the other being a very complex object, and the two have different solutions.
When working in a scene with many objects, we can simply toggle off the visibility of other objects in the outliner mode but if there are a lot of objects, this can be tedious. A quick solution is to select the object we want to work on and hit the numeric '/' key. We will jump into 'isolate' mode and all that will be visible is that single object. We can then go into edit mode and do what we need to do, then exit edit mode and hit numeric '/' to jump back out of isolate mode.
When dealing with a complex mesh object there are multiple options including mask, but I usually find 'hide' and 'unhide' to work well. To isolate part of a mesh to work on, in edit mode select the portion of the object we want to work on, hit ctl+i (inverse) and 'h' to hide. Any modifications will only effect the unhidden selection. It's important to understand what this means. If we add a uv sphere (shift+a) and go into edit mode, then select some polys, hide them 'h' and select the remaining polys and scale them, then unhide the rest (new key command, alt+h, unhides all) we will notice that the hidden faces did not scale and the resulting mesh is a combination of the scaled polys connected to the original unscaled (was hidden) polys. Try this to see the result.
On a related note, when working with a complex mesh, if we want to work on a portion of a mesh, we don't necessarily need to hide all of the rest of the mesh. Isolating that portion by hiding say and edge loop is often enough. To see this, add a uv sphere (shift+a,) go into edit mode (tab) and select a single edge loop (alt+click the edge) and hide it (h.) Now click on a single vert/poly/edge (doesn't matter which) and select linked (L) then scale (s.) Now this doesn't have to be scale, it could be any number of options such as proportional editing with the 'linked' option (very handy for morphs.) In fact, it is well worth the time to practice this with the proportional editing tool using the linked option to see how it works, I simply didn't want to overcomplicate the example.
Between these two sets of commands we should be able to reign in some of the complex meshes we often end up working with. Just remember, we will want to play with them and possibly find some tutorials that cover them to fully understand what they do and how they work so that we don't get any nasty surprises when we try to use them in a production situation.
Ray Dream Designer had a 'Lathe' tool that allowed us to create an outline and spin that outline around an axis to create an object such as a glass, vase, spindle, etc... This tool was very handy. It ends up Blender has a tool that does it also but it's not as obvious, it's the 'Spin' modifier. Now the Spin modifer also does a lot more in blender, such as create hand rails for a spiral staircase, create the steps for a spiral staircase, etc... so people often forget if they even knew that it can also be used as a simple lathe tool. This is a bit complex for a simple example but there are plenty of tutorials on the spin modifier so do a search if interested.
I've noticed a bug in Blender where the pan/zoom commands quit responding at times. I'm not sure what causes it but I have found a solution that appears to work in case anyone else runs into it. Simply changing view angles using the numeric keypad 1, 3, 7... seems to free the commands up again.
A quick note for anyone using a Wacom tablet with Blender. The modifier keys with a two finger gesture on the wacom tablet will work for zoom/pan the same as using modifiers with the middle mouse button. I set my pen up for click=left click, top rocker=right click, and bottom rocker=middle click for Blender.