Tag Archives: blender

Commonly Ignored Feature #7: Multiple Snapping Targets

It’s not an ignored feature, because it has to be the most well-hidden feature I’ve ever found. Seriously, whoever coded the snapping system must have completely forgotten to document this.

Yesterday afternoon in one of blender’s IRC channels hjaarnio mentioned this feature. It seemed that no one else knew of it’s existence – it wasn’t in the wiki and I couldn’t find any mention of it anywhere. This one is truly the Schrodinger’s cat of blender.

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While in snapping mode, when you have your mouse over a point to snap to, hit ‘A’ to mark that point. Then mark any other points you like and the selection will snap to the average of the marked points. It you want to give a certain point more weighting in that averaged location, just mark it more than once (as you can see in the end of that gif I mark the top right point a few times)

I’ve since updated the snapping page on the wiki.

This makes me think – what other strange and useful quirks lie out there beyond our exploration? What features have been painstakingly coded, only to have been forgotten forever? Probably quite a bit.

Metropolis

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I worked on this for a good couple days… it’s not finished, but I suppose it’s slightly usable.

There aren’t many city generators available for blender… in fact I only know of one, which is great but not very versatile. You kinda get what you get. What I wanted was a city generator that was so customizable that you could create any shape city of any layout of any scale on any planet… yeah. Obviously if it demands such vast possibilities, it can’t all be automated.

The plan was to have the user give it a set of buildings, a few images for scale/height maps and terrain stuffs, and even give it the street layout. The automation part is simply the placement of buildings along the streets. Simple. Yeah.

It’s probably the most complex stuff I’ve ever coded, not the hardest, just a lot going on to keep track of and integrate, while still keeping everything very customizable. It’s about 600 lines, which I suppose isn’t all that much to a seasoned coder, but for me it’s much more than anything I’ve done before :P

Placing buildings mostly evenly spaced and along a street is pretty easy, the challenging bit was preventing buildings from being created in the middle of an intersection, and along many curves at once without overlaps.

The solution was to increase the curve’s resolution a lot, convert them to meshes and join them all into one object. Then do a Remove Doubles to weld vertices that are close together. Why? Because this will join the lines together, making a vertex at each intersection that connects to both/all streets. Which means a simple search for verts with more than 2 edges connected will give us the position of the intersections!

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Deleting these intersection verts, separating the object by loose parts and converting it back to curves will give us the perfect set of curves to but the buildings on to make sure no buildings sit in the middle of an intersection.

imageAnd that’s pretty much as far as I got. So it’s functional… just not really useful.

When I next feel like working on this, I’ve got a long list of todo’s… so probably not for a while.

The end goal would be to include a building generator and stuff like that too. I seriously considered turning this into a kickstarter, but at the moment I don’t really have the experience nor the time for something as epic as this.

Cube of Doom

Batteries not included

Batteries not included

Another little personal project. A doodle of sorts. It has no purpose.

It’s an old model from a blendernerd tutorial (fixed up a bit), re-shaded and textured with, yes, Cycles.

In highschool we had a subject called Engineering and Graphics Design which we all had to take for the first two years. I caught on really quickly (this was pre-blender-obsession) and enjoyed it a whole lot. Why I didn’t take it further? I don’t know. I suppose I would be an entirely different person now if I had taken it instead of IT or Art, so I think I’m glad. One of my best friends took it so I got to see what they all did there anyways, and it didn’t look like much fun. Anyways, this image reminds me of those days because we would always draw from an isometric point of view (an orthographic camera where the X and Y axis are symmetrical… I think)

It’s a 1080p image and well suited to be a desktop background even if I say so myself :)