i use maya and lightwave and am a pretty active member of the lightwave community.

biggest problem i’ve found is just mousing… it would be nice to have a setup that allows the left mouse button to be SELECT in all contexts, middle mouse button to place the 3d cursor (and an option to turn 3d cursor off or at least make invisible) and RT button as context menus.

it’s great that it’s all remappable now but it’s tricky to go through every menu and context and change it from what it is to what you want.

i know it’s coming but presets for “foreign users” would be great.

2.5 is going to be amazing.

jin

p.s. and i can’t take blender srsly as a modeler until there is extrude AND inset/outset. that’s gotta be a given at this point.

Can Blender import the weight maps from an lwo file (LWO2) – and if so, how?

(I am trying to avoid remapping a model I made in Modo.)

I have tried a number of import/export variations, but to no avail..

* Knife Subdivide tool doesn’t appear to have a snap-to-grid function.

* Snapping selection to grid cannot be done on only one individual axis at a time. (And I’m not talking about the “type G then type x,y,or z and then Ctrl while dragging – this only moves in relative increments – it does not conform to the universal grid.)

* The position of individual vertices cannot be measured, as far as I know. So it’s difficult to confirm exact location.

* There appears to be no way to use one mesh as a subtractive brush to carve another. Can this be done? (Or for that matter, what about an additive brush?)

* I would also like to see various polyhedra in the list of meshes that can be created. I’ve imported meshes from a more primative freeware prog called Anim8or to get around this, so it’s only a minor inconvenience for me, but I believe that prog is PC only, so those with only Macs might be out of luck. Also, scaling these has been difficult due to the grid-snap issues previously mentioned.

* Is there a way to make a mesh conform to the shape of another? If you want to take for instance, a glob of ice cream and make it splatter on a character’s face by making the ice cream conform to the contours of the face…is this possible?

* I understand that the “Shift+E” method for creasing SubSurfs doesn’t translate when exporting to other non-Blender formats. It would be nice if this could be preserved somehow (perhaps by having the option to automatically add more geometry to achieve the same curves when exporting?).

With all that said, Blender is an awesome application and I have commited myself to completing all the tutorials and mastering it. Appreciation goes out to all developers.

If anyone out there knows how to accomplish the above tasks, please contact me at: quantumanomaly (at) gmail (dot) com
Thanks in advance.
-QA

There is a large difference between figuring out distances in your head and translating to units, for example for those of us taught on the english backwards way of measuring, 12 in=1 Foot, making it very difficult to model, for example, a 2×4x16 stick of lumber, which the actual dimensions would be… 1.5″ x 3.5″ x (16X12″)

Now wait until you get into the much more complex stuff as well. I am not looking for an architectural CAD program, but the ability to do something semi-accurate should not be to difficult. For example I recently did a lighting design in blender, the raytracing engine was great, and without to much work I could get Gels and Instruments working fine, but doing basic walls on the set was very difficult as getting things to but up to each other was incredibly hard.

Of course other things that I found useful were snaps, in particular allowing me to set up a guide for a model when I needed to. I need a desk that consist of two circles of differing diameters, I would lay out those two circles with the same center, and lay out arcs(Or in blender trace using curves if I needed), and erase the circles, connect the end of the arcs with line segments, of course then I could extrude if I needed to after I made the appropriate faces.

These are just useful tools, the snaps would be tougher to me from a promgramming standpoint to implement, but the unit measurement shouldnt be to difficult IMO, but I haven’t looked at blender’s code at all to be able to say for certain in this case.

The ability to redefine hotkeys would be interesting, not sure if I am for it or against it, I think more for it at the moment though.

Seablade

@Early Ehlinger
I registered over at Respower about a week ago. I just did not have the time to try your services though. I have some projects that will rely on your services pretty soon. Thanks for offering your help. I will contact you for sure.

Actually I solved this high resolution problem a different way: I did a large render (not too large :) ) sent it through autotrace and did some optimizations. Now it looks great, and is scalable to infinity.

One more reason why I prefer Blender over Lightwave: Respower is way cheaper ;)

In Blender, you don’t have to always explicitly active the Grab (G-key) tool to be able to move things.

Try this in Blender: Select any vertex/object by dragging with the RMB. Also, select multiple vertices/objects using Shift-RMB but, when selecting the last one, do it with Shift-dragRMB (just like with the single vertex earlier). In either case, after the tool has been activated, you can release the RMB and continue to perform the function on your selection.

Blender also has Mouse Gestures for basic operations like Scale, Grab, and Rotate! No keystroke required! Check the wiki for more details. At some point, I’ll cover this on my website.