Talk:Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Mountains Out Of Molehills

Creating it
I volunteer to create this tutorial (I'll start work on it when home and have blender to work with directly). However, I think subsurf edge creases, as detailed in Weighted Creases for Subsurfs, should be moved to an intermediate tutorial. But I can create this one as well if so desired. --camel 02:18, May 9, 2005 (UTC)


 * Great! Thanx for your help!  I wouldn't consider subsurf edges to be intermediate.  Since you're planning on helping out a bit around here, let me sort of explain what my vision is for the book.


 * Beginner Tutorials focus on learning how to use the tools, hotkeys available in the blender. this is mostly technical documentation


 * Intermediate Tutorials focus on the artistic use of the tools learned in the beginner tutorials. Some people say that you can't teach somebody to be an artist.  I beg to differ.  The ability to become an artist is in the desire.  Artistic modeling, artistic lighting, artistic scene creation, artistic animation.


 * Advanced Tutorials focus on the advanced functions of the Blender, such as python scripting for advanced animation, advanced modeling, etc.


 * If you can see my vision here (and if you can agree with it), then you'll see why I want subsurf edges to be in the Beginner Tutorials. Obviously a lot more tutorials will need to be created in the Beginning Tutorials part to make it comprehensive.  --Spiderworm 21:56, 11 May 2005 (UTC)


 * I didn't really see much effect from the bit about the subsurf creases . . . I'm not sure what was supposed to happen there. If this is an important tool, perhaps it would be useful to put in a tutorial page specifically dedicated to it? -- Glasnerven

Great Work
I haven't been around for awhile, but I popped my head in today and saw this. I want to congratulate those have have been working on this tutorial. It looks great so far. Keep it up! --Spiderworm 14:48, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * I agree. Nice tutorial.

Suggestions
The article says "On our Sharp Falloff mountain, the second one we did, select the first two edges on the right (starting from the point down)." Maybe it's just me, but I find this sentence confusing and I don't know which edges it means. I suggest it be accompanied by a screenshot. I understand the page isn't finished, I just thought I'd suggest that. 68.126.1.251 19:57, 30 October 2005 (UTC)


 * I Agree. Some clearification would be appreciated. 217.212.250.6 16:56, 29 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Make sure you are in side view NUM3 and then its easy to see which two edges, i.e. starting from the top point of the mountain select the first two edges on the right side (in side view there is only a "left" and "right" side of the mountain). --203.144.160.243 12:08, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

New version out- whole thing out of date- remove or re-do the choice is yours.

First mountain & Shaping the World sections.
I'm trying to change the radius of influence but NOTHING seems to be working. This is very frustrating because I went through this part of Noob-to-Pro many versions back and this part went smoothly. I'm pressing Gkey to grab the vertex, then rolling the mouse-wheel, pressing pgUP, pgDN, nothing is working. Yes, proportional edit falloff is on with 'smooth' selected. I've tried what the other note says also (ALT + NUM+ pgUP/pgDN) and that doesn't work. Could I get some clarification here? ***I fixed the problem by restarting blender... ***


 * I had the exact same problem and restarting blender fixed it. I'll write this into the main article.  Khono (talk) 21:15, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

In the 'First mountain' section I think the radius of influence acts as a sphere rather than a circle, which if correct would be worth mentioning as sometimes vertices aren't affected as you would expect within the radius of influense from the 2D views, especially when playing around with a larger radii. This is, therefore, due to them not actually being within the 3D 'sphere of influence'.

I cannot make the radius of selection thing do a thing. Not with ALT or whatever. Not after a restart either. Nothing, nada zilch.

Miscellaneous Comments
The 'Shaping the World' section doesn't seem very clear, i.e. we don't seem to be trying to acheive anything useful on the model. Perhaps a picture would help here. Maybe as an explanation the author could say he was aiming to make the moutains look a little more 'real' by making the vertices/edges less uniform through rotating them.

Great tutorials in general, very much appreciated by me & I'm sure many others. [user: mr_spoon, entry: 2/Jan/06].

I am enjoying this tutorial but would have appreciated something more on what to do with our hat wearing figure and the mountians. Such as how do we place it in the "mountain range". I don't want to edit anything as I am SUCH a n00b right now (ie: went and bought a multi-button mouse for my mac last night!).

I would like to second that last point..(I am a complete Noob too). It woul be great if there were instructions on how we could insert our man/hat inot the mountain scence :)


 * I took the first line to be a segway only (kind of a joke), not meaning that we would actually insert the man into the scene. --203.144.160.243 12:08, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

8-Bit?
Actually, anything 3D would be to powerful for an 8-Bit console. Even something as chunky as that. - A Guest that'll probably never post again

Smoothing things out
"On our Sharp Falloff mountain, the second one we did, select the first two edges on the right (starting from the point down)." Which point down? Top? This is a bit confusing.

Also, it seemed impossible to drag to get a value of 1 for the crease, no matter how far I zoomed out I couldn't get 1. Typing 1 worked fine though. Correction -- when using the menu that comes up when you hit space, the location of the mouse pointer is wherever the last menu choice is. So if you choose space->edit-edges->crease subsurf the mouse might be far away from the relevant edge. This will cause the effect of the mouse motion to be less pronounced, and more fine-grained, and it may not be able to get to the value of 1.

Great tutorial in general! Thanks for all the hard work.

Help him with changing radius of influence
Someone put this in the main page....

02:37, 18 August 2007 12.183.160.70 (Talk) (14,027 bytes) (→Peaks vs. hills)

"I do everything you say and the radius circle dosent show up how will I get it to show up?

Here is a picture.

http://i191.photobucket.com/albums/z148/purgarus/help.jpg"

--Pedro Fonini 21:44, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

It took me a while to get the radius to change too. What I didn't find clear from the page was the exact order of events: Bob Dowling (discuss • contribs) 07:36, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
 * 1) Select vertex/vertices
 * 2) Specify operation (e.g. G)
 * 3) THEN use the mouse wheel to adjust the radius of influence
 * 4) Make the operation (move the mouse, specify axis and amount, etc.)

Naturalness?
At the very beginning of this section, you say "select the second vertex from the top in the center". Could you just explain a little more which vertex you mean exactly and on what mountain (the one with the smooth falloff, or the one with the sharp falloff) this vertex exists? I think a picture for the vertex that should be selected may be a great help.

About newbie notes
I'm starting to think that "newbie notes" should instead be called "pro notes". The tutorial is meant for newbies anyway, so why call advanced tips "newbie notes"? Some "newbie notes" I've encountered also tend to confuse newbies rather than enlighten.

Considering the books "Noob to Pro" aspect, I think Pro notes would be better for any kind of note that adds insight to a concept, or presents another way to do something. A few other tutorials I notice use the "Noob Notes" but I think the title best fits a note that highlights a common mistake made by newbies. --Vi3gamehkr (discuss • contribs) 20:15, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Append/Link
Some more clarification on appending/linking to the new project would be nice. I can't seem to get it to happen.

I agree, I've followed the steps multple times and nothing seems to happen when I click load library.

Smoothing things out
''Noob Henry: What I do is take the mountain, and then set a subsurf level of two. Then, I hit the 'set smooth' button, and use the individual vertices to make it look authentic.''

Shaping the world
[Noobie Roy says: Huh??? I don't understand what I'm supposed to be achieving here. What is supposed to happen when I rotate? As far as I can see, nothing at all happens. Can you maybe show us a before and after screenshot? Or maybe explain in more detail? Thanks!] [Noobie Sean says: Roy, you made the mountains by using proportional editing with grab/move. Moving one vertex moved its neighbours, within the proportional circle. Rotate and scale also use proportional editing to rotate or scale about the selected vertex much like the grab/move operation.]

[Noobie Larry says: I tried rotating just that one point but nothing happens]

[One thing to watch out for is the range of affected vertices. If the range is too small, then rotating will affect just the selected vertex. If the range is too large, it will rotate everything together. You can adjust the range by scrolling.]

[Dusty says: To answer Noobie Roy, the reason nothing may happen, is that the circle of influence may be only including the vertex that you have selected when you first hit R. After pressing R scroll the mouse wheel to increase the circle include the other vertices next to the one selected, then type 90 and you'll see the effect. Scroll the mouse wheel further more (to include more vertices) and you see the effect spread out.]

[Another newbie says: two things to keep in mind here: really weird things will happen here if you set the rotation/scaling pivot to "3d cursor" at this point (I assume the intention is to rotate around the single selected vertex, so the other pivot modes will all work, I think), and (as Dusty says) you must increase the effective radius quite a bit (use the scrollwheel after pressing RKEY, just keep going until you are affecting half the plane to see what's going on). What makes it a bit confusing is that some vertices seem to be inside the initial affected region (with the radius you used to create the previous mountain) in the two-dimensional side view, but that affected region is actually a three-dimensional sphere, so you cannot tell from just that side view what vertices are inside the affected region. I am not explaining this very well, but it helps to have more than one 3d view open so you can see that every vertex is outside the affected radius in at least one view (try splitting the main view into 4 equally sized parts so you can have a top, front, side and "free" 3d view open all at the same time).[Yet another noob says: if you are following the tutorial exactly, your proportional edit falloff will be at sharp at this point. This makes the effect of the rotation hard to see unless your circle of influence is quite large.]

[Dbproguy mentions: From what I am seeing, this effects the texture of the mountain, so it's not so plain.]

[hendric: Newbie, but I think I got the tutorial demonstrating what it should be doing. I added screenshots of my full workspace and changed the wording to explain a little better. I am wiki-illiterate so any changes to prettify it are welcome.]


 * First, thanks for working hard to create this tutorial, I really appreciate it, but I had some difficulty following this section. When we're told to rotate -90 degrees. I think it would be helpful to know which axis you're talking about, I assumed (based on the text) it was the side view (thus around the x axis), however the screenshots look more like it was rotated around the y axis. Also, Did the height of the mountains change somewhere? I cannot seem to get my view to look like yours no matter what combination of + or - 90 degrees around the x or y axis I try Lxxxv (discuss • contribs) 22:08, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

14 Adding the Hat Guy, for noobies reading the book.
I followed the previous tutorials on modeling the simple person and his hat and his armature. This file is saved separately as suggested by this tutorial and commenced work on a new one. Later, when I bring in the hat guy into another layer, your tutorial needs to mention: a. The person 'cube' as he's called, b. The hat, called 'circle' c. His armature, all three have to be imported, and the parent-child relationship between the hat and the head need to be re-defined. Then, the parent-armature relation has to be defined too. However, since the simple person is drawn at rest position and the armature is in a pose, the import brings the two cutting-through each other. Thus, a parent>armature creates ugly and bizarre appendages to the limbs and other areas.

The section of appending the hat-person has to be expanded. You need to mention a pre-append stage, where the armature has to be kept at the rest position before appending. Then, a post-append stage mentions the simple step of how to move the three components into a new layer, and then how to re-establish the parent>child and parent>armature relationships. Finally, switch on the view on both layers, scale and shift the person to correctly stand on the terrain, and add salt and pepper to taste.

regards niyam bhushan

Naturalness - Proportional Editing
I noticed in a "noob note," a comment about proportional editing settings. First off, if it is more efficient (doesn't create more vertices/mesh) why don't we just change that section of the tutorial to use it. Secondly, where are the "proportional editing settings?" --Vi3gamehkr (discuss • contribs) 20:20, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

The Append Button
Where can you find the 'append' button. At the last bit you press Shift + F1, but i see no 'append'. I do see the 'link' button. A picture would be nice :)

Keys
Do you seriously have to format the alphabet hotkeys like *KEY? Up until this tutorial, if you wanted to scale, it would have been just "S" not "SKEY". I think it's really annoying.


 * Yes, it was. Triggered me so hard I changed it all. Couldn't find any specific phrase to use for Page Up and Page Down so that would be useful. Also removed the Editing the Hat Guy in section, as it seems irrelevant and also people seemed to have major trouble following it anyway. MS10EL (discuss • contribs) 21:34, 8 September 2016 (UTC)