I have started learning Blender 2.8 as of May-25. Almost 10 years ago, I was using 3dmax v7 but only as a hobby. I want to start doing 3ding again as hobby but got no money to have something that is up to date. So I chose Blender.
Now I have a few questions. I will surely have more questions later. I am still thinking in terms of 3dmax ways.
How do I recenter the object pivot if I accidentally displaced it with MB1 and doing Ctrl-Z is not a solution ?
How do I align vertices to the grid but only using the axis of my choice ? (ex: align on the X axis grid or any other axis of my choice)
how do I group object parts (vertices, faces, ...) as different groups and then working with the group of my choice ?
how can I maximize the view port with one single keys shortcut thus hiding every menus and then once I am done doing what I wanted to on that maxed view, revert back to whatever interface view I was using before ?
how to select anything using a region drawn by mouse movements (meaning selecting without using box or circle or shift, just mouse mouvements)?
Firstly blender 2.80 is under heavy development while making some major changes so can be of varying functionality for now. I would suggest you start learning with 2.79b until 2.80 is finished.
There are several options when it comes to choosing a pivot point, I think what you are referring to is setting the object origin.
There are several snapping options and ways to control transformations. You can limit movement to one axis by pressing it's key while transforming, eg GX will only move along the X axis, you can not move on one axis by adding ⇧ Shift - G⇧ ShiftX will move on Y and Z but not X. To align vertices to one axis is it common to scale to zero one the axis, eg SX0 will scale the verts on the x axis so they all align, in object mode you can do the same as long as you enable manipulate centre points. There are align options available in some addons, like align tools and mesh align plus.
Blender doesn't have vertex grouping and I don't know of any addons that add it. You can assign vertices to a vertex group and use that to select/deselect a collection of vertices.
There are two options to maximise the viewport - ⎈ Ctrl↑ Up arrow will maximize the viewport, the info bar at the top and headers for the view will remain in place or ⎇ AltF10 will make the view full screen also removing the info bar and headers. Also the window layouts are saved as screens which you can make and define to your liking, by saving these screens in your startup blend you can keep them available each time you use blender. The default screens include a 3D only layout.
For lasso select you can hold ⎈ Ctrl while pressing the non-select mouse button to draw an arbitrary region to select items within.
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I have a pyQt interface where the user can select a region of a matplotlib plot using rectangleSelector. My issue is the if the user wants to select a region including the edge of the visible region of the plot, it always stops short. Depending how fast the mouse is moved, it may fall far short. It appears that the box stops updating once the mouse exists the plot axes. This is in contrast to, for example, the built-in magnifying glass selector, which allows the user to drag a box far outside the plot region. Is there a way to force rectangleSelector to select beyond, or at least right up to, the visible plotted areas?
Matlab has a useful zoom mode triggered by zoom xon or zoom yon whereby you can click-and-drag with the mouse to zoom in on data, but with only one dimension (x or y, respectively) changing. Instead of an elastic box, the cursor changed into an elastic I-beam that allowed you to set the beginning and end of the range quite precisely.
Is there any way of getting a matplotlib figure to do the same thing? Playing with the toolbar, and briefly looking into the code behind it, I only see a "zoom rect" mode.
I'm aware that you can approximate this effect by right-clicking-and-dragging in "pan" mode, while trying to ensure that your hand only moves in one dimension, but that can be quite frustratingly imprecise. If there were a zoom xon equivalent, I would gladly use that instead.
The interactive navigation lists among its shortcuts
Constrain pan/zoom to x axis: hold x when panning/zooming with mouse
Constrain pan/zoom to y axis: hold y when panning/zooming with mouse
I'm trying to make a round eye in my object by selecting a face, pressing e, dragging it into the face a little bit and I'm trying to make that eye round instead of square. How can I do this?
There is "To Sphere" AltShiftS available under Mesh->Transform. As the name suggests it adds a spherical influence, if the selected verts lay flat on a plane the result is circular.
Another option is an addon called LoopTools. Enable it and you have some extra options in the specials menu (W) which includes Circle, which will give a circular influence to the selected vertices.
I am designing a simple music app where the user gets to play instruments i.e. Drums, and the problem that I am facing is with resolutions.
The drums are images, which I have converted them into buttons. Everything looks great at the state that I have designed it.
However, when I switch to other resolution states, the button(image) are distorted, e.g. skewed, scaled, and looks nasty.
I have tried designing or arranging them via selecting 'Enable state Recording', but the specific designs for that state are not being saved.
Have you tried the approaches discussed here? http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465362.aspx For the actual button sizes, make sure you are not fixing the width/height with pixel values. Use * weighted rows and columns to layout your grids and have the buttons autosize to fill a given cell in the grid. Then match with the appropriate image resource per the article.
Grids are great for dividing up available space but they can't account for changes in aspect ratios. If your items are still set to Stretch (or Fill) then they can end up out of aspect ratio. Another option is to design the entire layout at a fixed size (let's say 1024 x 768 or 1366 x 768) and wrap the entire thing in a ViewBox. ViewBox will scale all elements equally and maintain the aspect ratio, adding letterboxing (or empty space) on the sides / top & bottom if necessary. This might be a better approach for a drum kit.
Hope that helps.
Redid the whole project of designing again.
This time, I put the image inside a specific grid and that made things lot better. :)
I am in the process of making my 2D engine for a Beat'em Up game (Castle Crashers is what I call Beat'em Up or Brawler kind of game ).
I will support 2D sprites and 2D particle emitters. This is all done in the engine now. But I have come to an issue that I would like to ask for advice:
It's about "space" management, what I thought was to do something as this image shows:
alt text http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/9162/spacingprototype1.png
My idea is to make a grid ( Spatial Hash or Grid ), of the ground where my Particle Emitters / 2D sprites will live. In my picture, I have enumerated this slots from 1 to N, (don't have to be 35, it's just for showing purposes ). My idea is to draw the "GameElements" (Sprites/Emitters) in order from 0 to N , ( going from bucket 0 to bucket N ) , so then I will get them to display correctly overlapped on screen (back to forward).
I know this could be done by just comparing the lower Y axis of each Element and performing a "quicksort" too, but having the Grid could allow me to perform Collision Detection in a better way , and if I do something like A* to implement some kind of AI, it could help me too.
If you want to have some sort of optimization for the number of objects you need to test against each other, you might want to think about using a Quadtree
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadtree
The idea is to divide the screen up in 4 nodes, placing all items in the node they belong, then divide the nodes you just created up in another 4 if there are sprites/items/whatever in there that need to be tested. Keep doing this until a certain size or amount of items in a node has been reached.
You can then ask the top-node if it contains the item you want to test. This node will then ask the child-nodes if it contains the item, which in their turn will ask their children. This way a large part of the screen can be skipped already (if it's located in child 00, you can skip child 01, 10 and 11). Then you get a list of items you perform more specific collision detection on when it's desired to do so.
If you were to make it visual, it would look a bit like this:
alt text http://geodata.ethz.ch/geovite/tutorials/L2GeodataStructuresAndDataModels/en/images/quadtree.gif
Fire them out to the Z buffer and let that worry about it.
If you find that in the future it is too slow (via profiling obviously) then look at optimizing it.
Take the simplest solution and move on.
Your method fails if you have two sprites occupying the same box in the grid. Suppose you have two enemies both standing in the same box. One stands slightly in front of the other. Which do you draw first? You would need two algorithms - one which divides the sprites into the grid, and the second which looks at the z co-ordinates of all the sprites in a given grid box and draws them based on that value.
A far simpler method is to have a single collection of all sprites. It should store all sprites sorted by their z co-ordinates (from the back of the screen at the head of the list to the front of the screen at the back). Loop through the collection and draw each sprite as it appears. When a sprite moves into or out of the screen (ie. its z co-ordinate changes) you can perform a very simple sort to move that single sprite within the collection. Keep swapping it with the next sprite in the list until the next sprite's z co-ordinate is greater than/less than (as appropriate) the changed sprite's co-ordinate.