My wife isn't exactly sure where to turn. She's been struggling mightily with Blender and losing at every turn. We bought the [800 page] book, but it really doesn't address the problems she's running into and she's going nuts constantly fighting with the program. As I mentioned a few months back, what she wants to do is "geometric" stuff [for example, a currrent hack: two intersecting tetrahedra and then be able to highlight and play with the octahedron that shows up in their intersection]. I'd have thought that that kind of thing would be fairly easy [extrapolating frm the similar 2-D stuff I've done with both Illustrator and Visio], but apparently not. The types of things that are making her go bonkers: 1) the edges. Since Blender deals with 3D objects, you need to have some kind of 'strut' to use for the edges. She decided on using triangular-cross-section struts. But then to make that work out properly, she apparently had to hand-compute the intersections between the structs [at the odd angles that they show up in in polyhedra] and by-hand "mitre" the struts so that they fit "just right" with no points sticking out. Does that sound right? [she and I ended up struggling to remember high-school trig and were throwing around lots of sqrt(3)s and such, but I can't imagine that an "artist type" who would want some kind of polyhedron or the like would even know HOW to do the 8-decimal- place calculations, much less want to bother to be hand-trimming each strut. She/I/We *must* be missing something. 2) Faces. Apparently, in order to do faces she needed to compute-by- hand the coordinates of the vertices and then fit a face to it, but apparently once she does that the vertices are "gone" and if she needs to remove or redo the face, she has to start over with the vertex calculations... [not to mention just having to *compute* the coordinates of the vertices of a polyhedron feels very wrong to me]. My guess is that she's missing some key intution on how to use blender for this type of application [partly extrapolating from my experience with "2D" tools, where I don't do any of that stuff: I use skews and rotates and copying/pasting and such and let the program do all the heavy-trig-lifting; I use layers to allow me to "scribble" and test fitting pieces in over stuff that was already done, but that allows me to easily wipe it away if I screw it up]. The problem is that we don't know where to turn to try to figure out what's going on -- virtually all of the Blender info is aimed at *animation* [which is not what my wife is interested in - what she wanted/needed was a 3D modeling/drawing program] and *artists* [rather than geometers or engineers or the like]. Do any of you know of any Blender resources that might help shed some light on this kind of use of the program? THANKS!!! /Bernie\ -- Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers mailto:bernie@fantasyfarm.com Pearisburg, VA --> Too many people, too few sheep <--
Bernie Cosell wrote:
My wife isn't exactly sure where to turn. She's been struggling mightily with Blender and losing at every turn...
As I mentioned a few months back, what she wants to do is "geometric" stuff [for example, a currrent hack: two intersecting tetrahedra and then be able to highlight and play with the octahedron that shows up in their intersection]...
One way to make the two tetrahedra in Blender is that you could start with a cube, select appropriate subsets of three vertices, and use the 'f' command to create a face using them. Create the eight triangles, delete the original cube, and the "Stella Octangula" remains. I have some class notes online for making various polyhedral forms with Maya. I realize Maya has a somewhat different set of primitives than Blender, but there may be some useful ideas in it: http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~cse125/notes/10-Maya-Geometric.ppt George http://www.georgehart.com
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Bernie Cosell -
George W. Hart