Blender Questions

[The Raging Sandwich]

So I made a space station in Blender:

I'm trying to make an animation with it, sort of like a 2001 sort-of docking scene. So a couple questions:

1. How do I get rid of the dotted cube thing off of the bottom of it (I have no clue what I did to get it there and what it does?)
2. How do I make the whole thing one whole piece instead of everything being separate pieces
3. How do I make it rotate?

If you know how, thanks for answering as I'm new to it.

Edited April 14, 2017 by The Raging Sandwich

[WinkAllKerb'']

for the cube, check blender various entity hierarchy tab, you might find it somewhere (else it's another overlay from another functionalities, thoose area per default just under the hierarchy within blender), then for the anim as far as i remind use "layers" to separate the various object, also if i remind well the order of each object is important once in unity in term of bone scheme (wich mean within the hierarchy it's preferable,to get nodal object at the extremities)

try to pm someone that use blender, and make some anim lately ^^ you might get a quick answer as well ^^

can't give more clue or hint because it's been a while but theres  prolly some good tuto in the modeling sub forum and sticky

Edited April 10, 2017 by WinkAllKerb''

[The Raging Sandwich]

@WinkAllKerb'', where would I find the entity hierarchy tab? Also, I don't really know what a lot of this means like "bone scheme"  because I just started today. Thanks for the help!

[WinkAllKerb'']

per default it's top left, it kinda layers like photoshop with various kind of object sub-object and all, for animation i recommand you split your object in various layers it make it easier, think about it like photoshop and multiple image

if you anticipe and split your element it's way easier to anim and to export to unity, and set up within unity afterward (but as said  i played with that so long ago that i don't remind exactly ^^ 300% rusted mode on hihi) i can't even share you my blender model because my old pc is rip with boot sector error ^^

give me a second i m checking some old thread to see if there some files you could use as tuto

Edited April 10, 2017 by WinkAllKerb''
see pm raging ^^ hope it will help you ^^

[0111narwhalz]

I don't know off the top of my head what that cube is. Have you tried selecting it? Try investigating bounding boxes?

However, I can help you with some of the other questions.

Number two: Select all the components. Then, make sure either the main body or an empty created for this purpose is the active object. You'll know it's active because it has a brighter outline and its origin is visible. If it's a mesh, Edit mode will edit the active object. Then hit Ctrl-P (for Parent), and everything will be children of the active object. Double check the Outliner window to see that there will be a new section in the hierarchy, accessable by expanding the parent's list. Now, however you transform the parent (location, rotation, or scale), all the children will follow. You can still transform the children individually. You can also make the hierarchy as deep as you need, so you can move groups of children or do constraints and stuff.

Number three: You need the Timeline and the Graph Editor windows. The Timeline allows you to place keyframes, which properties are edited in the Graph Editor. You need to create an appropriate keyframe of the parent at the start of the timeline (I don't recall what all the different kinds are, but for your application, you probably just want one with rotation and maybe position). It should show up with a number of points and/or lines in the Graph Editor. If it doesn't, you'll need to either go into the heirarchy in the left panel of the Graph Editor and show the things or zoom out. With angles, note that they're represented in degrees. Then, once you have at least two keyframes, you can manipulate them. It will draw a Bezier spline between them. To play the animation in the 3D View, hit Alt-A.

[WinkAllKerb'']

the cube might has to do with the properties tab, some of the stuff there could activate some specific overlay if i remind within this tab, may be like the ones for boolean and etc ... not sure at all tho'

Edited April 10, 2017 by WinkAllKerb''

[Waxing_Kibbous]

Selecting multiple objects and Ctrl-J should join objects as well. Knowing about parent/child relationships is really powerful though, it's good to get a grasp of that. The issue with using parent/child is that you can still move the child by accident. You could also attach all the parts to one bone and animate the bone. I've always been more of a fan of armature animation vs object animation, rigging is a good thing to know if you want to get into 3D. There are always many ways to do things in Blender 

 

Edited April 13, 2017 by Waxing_Kibbous

[0111narwhalz]

45 minutes ago, Waxing_Kibbous said:

Ctrl-J

I thought this was impossible! My Google-fu is severely lacking.

[The Raging Sandwich]

@Waxing_Kibbous, how do I select multiple objects? I can only seem to select 1 at a time.

@WinkAllKerb'', where is the properties tab?

Edited April 13, 2017 by The Raging Sandwich

[0111narwhalz]

2 hours ago, The Raging Sandwich said:

how do I select multiple objects? I can only seem to select 1 at a time.

Simply shift-click with the same mouse button that selects one. (It's RMB by default.)

2 hours ago, The Raging Sandwich said:

where is the properties tab?

In the default layout, it's on the right, below the Outliner. I'll get some images of all the different pieces later today.

Do you know how to manipulate the interface? Move and resize the windows, add new ones and get rid of them, that kind of thing.

[WinkAllKerb'']

^^ lot of modules, anim, video, calculation, imag editing, uv etc & etc...
the main difference than some others software is that blender gui is a little less "ergonomic" and intuitive at first than some professionnal licensed software ^^ but it's free for the average user and do what most pro software do, & sometime it do even more than some specific oriented pro licensed software ^^ so it's a fair share ^^

Edited April 14, 2017 by WinkAllKerb''

[The Raging Sandwich]

@0111narwhalz, I know how to resize the windows, but that's about it.

Thanks, @WinkAllKerb'' and nawhalz

[WinkAllKerb'']

it's not resize it about using multiple window at the same time, the one you need for what your'e currently doing ^^ np and feel free as said in pm ^^

Edited April 13, 2017 by WinkAllKerb''

[0111narwhalz]

Pictures!

At the left end of the toolbar, you should see a button on its own. This is how you select the window type.

When I say things like "properties" or "outliner," look to this dropdown. Also note that toolbars can be on either the top or bottom of a window, and can even be hidden.

Additionally, you can create new windows by right-clicking on a window edge and selecting "split area," as shown:

Resize and speciate as needed. If you'd like to get rid of a window, click "join area" instead and click on the window you want to get rid of.

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

I'm not really any good at animations myself, but here's a quick rundown of what I do know:

First of all, you have to think of every scene in blender as being a frame in an animation. 

This is how you move along this animation:

Click and drag, left and right arrow keys, and the buttons on the button all let you move along the timeline.

To move an object from point a to point b, we use keyframes. A frame with a keyframe "saves" the location, rotation and scale of all objects as they are currently. Move the line on the timeline to a point where you want something to change, change that thing, and press "i" to add a keyframe. 

This menu lets you select what kind of keyframe to make. LocRotScale saves location rotation and scale, and is the most common. 

Blender will move, rotate, and scale objects smoothly between these frames.

The end result when you press animate looks like this:

Next up: the graph editor. This is a graph this looks like this:

You can get to it by setting the view to "animation." 

The graph editor lets you control how the object moves from keyframe to keyframe. For example, I can change the z-axis movement like this:

Which looks like this:

(Note the more sudden way the cube stops moving upwards.)

And the graph editor has a similarly editable curve for x,y,z rotation in all 3 axes, and scale.

Finally, this cheat sheet is very useful:

Edited April 13, 2017 by Mad Rocket Scientist
graph editor

[0111narwhalz]

2 minutes ago, Mad Rocket Scientist said:

dope sheet

I think that's the graph editor.

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

1 minute ago, 0111narwhalz said:

I think that's the graph editor.

Thanks, I always forget that the name of the window is on the bottom of the window, not the top.

[WinkAllKerb'']

i love shortcut, well thks a lot for this one mad

[The Raging Sandwich]

Thanks everybody for the help so far, making everything one whole piece like @Waxing_Kibbous said to do removed the weird cube at the bottom, so that's two things out of the way in one! Now on to rotation...

[The Raging Sandwich]

I got it spinning!

https://www.screencast.com/t/x13ujW5QO

Is there anyway I can make it go slower and make it continuous so it doesn't slow down and stop at the end?

Edited April 14, 2017 by The Raging Sandwich
Put it as a link instead

[0111narwhalz]

Slower: Scale the rotation into time. That is, grab the end and drag it later.

Continuity: Place your stop/end/out (can't remember what it's called) point on the last keyframe. Adjust the tangents of the first and last keyframes so that they would connect smoothly (that is, give them the same slope and weight). If you want a continuous, constant-speed rotation, point each tangent at the other keyframe vertex. This should yield a straight line, and thus constant rotational speed.

[Waxing_Kibbous]

18 hours ago, The Raging Sandwich said:

I got it spinning!

https://www.screencast.com/t/x13ujW5QO

Is there anyway I can make it go slower and make it continuous so it doesn't slow down and stop at the end?

It's been a while, but in the animation curve editor there is a "key" menu, you can set interpolation mode to linear to stop ease in/out. This should be more perfect than dragging handles.

edit: to slow down you need to add more time between keyframes, so if you are rendering at 30fps and you want it to take 3 sec to make a rotation it has to span 90 frames (or 89 for looping, you want to drop one right? It's been a while like I said )

Here is a vid I found

 

 

Edited April 14, 2017 by Waxing_Kibbous

[0111narwhalz]

Alright, my turn.

I'm trying to use particles to model the exhaust of a rocket. That's not really the problem. The problem is that I want the color of the exhaust particles to change as they age. I've looked around, and everyone seems to use a Particle Age node feeding age and lifetime into a Math node set to divide. However, this little "circuit" simply doesn't work for me. It seems to always return zero, or something very close. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. If images/blend files are required for diagnosis, I'll be able to get them in a couple hours.

[0111narwhalz]

"A few hours" ~= "A few days," right?

Of note is this little thing here:

I've seen this used all over the place to do exactly what I'm doing. However, "Age" seems to always return zero. You can see by the stream of particles that they never change color, indicating that the value of "Age" also never changes. I've created a new material to rule out any prior errors.

Here's the .blend file. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4z16gRI-C__US1Mc0RGWVF1T2M/view?usp=sharing

[0111narwhalz]

It would appear that the particle info node returns meaningless things for metaball particles. It works just fine now that I'm using a simple mesh to create the particle instead. That's a shame; I was hoping to have exhaust that would glob together.