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Archive for category modeling

normals display in blender 2.6x

Jan 1

Posted by kiki in 3d, blender, modeling | Comments off

I was working on a simple mesh in Unity in Blender 2.65a and I could not for the life of me remember how to show normals (to find some flipped normals that were causing faces to show improperly). Some spots say that the normals are displayable from the N-Key panel in the 3D view, but I thought a more concrete bit of information in order.

First, the normals are only displayed in edit mode. While in edit mode, if you mouse over the 3D viewport and then press the N-Key, you should see buttons appear in the N-Key panel under the Mesh Display category. Pressing one of those buttons will either show vertex normals or face normals, respectively.

The Mesh Display buttons that appear in edit mode.

Nice thing about Unity is how it updates; I love that saving over an old FBX file will replace every instance of the mesh in scene prefabs, provided you haven’t done anything wacky. One save and all the normals get set to where they need to be. Not to mention, the Unity 4.0 interface upgrades are a great addition!

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501 for christmas

Dec 25

Posted by kiki in 3d, modeling, music | Comments off

Modo 501 is looking fantastic. I downloaded it today, and I can’t wait to put it through it’s paces. I’m especially excited about the revamped painting and sculpting, since it means I can stay in one app as opposed to jumping back and forth between Maya and Mudbox or ZBrush. But more that that, I feel like Modo is exactly where Blender will be once the 2.5 series is put to bed and gives birth to a stable 2.6. Everything is scriptable and it’s extremely simple to make new commands, or commands that properly refire when using interface sliders. I think my favorite part is, I’ve yet to find a feature I don’t like that I couldn’t disable or otherwise change its behavior. Even the default space bar behavior (which switches between component editing modes) is changeable; mine is set to pick item mode now. Not to mention, one of the new guys at work, Rowan, is a Modo master. He’s been invaluable in finding out where things are.

It’s a pretty steep learning curve both modeling and scripting-wise, particularly for someone who’s only really done 3D scripting through the Maya and Blender APIs. Also, while every tool I use when modeling seems to exist in Modo, the names and methods for use are so different that it’s taken me all week to find the first quarter of my usual bag of tricks. But I’ve also picked up a few new ones, like Background Constraint with Vector direction. Holy crap, did I not know I wanted that feature so badly.

Blender’s always going to be there for me, but at least until the 2.5 series stabilizes (and the input manager stops getting stuck when I sculpt, making sculpting impossible), I have a new swiss-army knife for work. Oh, and Luxology: thank you for making my ordering process amazing. I’m not going to say why I’m so happy with you on this blog, but if more companies behaved like you I’d be a happier person all around.

It’s funny, though– I’m not finding with Modo that I fight the learning curve as much as I do when I move to, say, Houdini. Modo draws from all the best parts of Blender, Maya, and Lightwave, so it just works for my head. Here’s to being more efficient with modeling tasks in 2011!

By the way, the new Gorillaz album (the one recorded on an iPad) is up for streaming. I like it a lot more than Plastic Beach. In fact, it feels a lot like D-Sides, which is one of my favorite collections of their music. If you’re a fan, definitely check it out. And if anyone knows what iPad software Albarn used to master these songs, please let me know.