Blender Help

Blender is a 3d Modeling tool primarily used by Linux users, although it is cross platform. It is powerful, but different than the most common (but extremely expensive) 3d software, which is 3dsmax. I’ll detail some differences here…

In 3dsmax when you create a flat plane or attempt to edit the flat face of a cube primative it is normally made up of two triangular faces and the interior edge is invisible. If you move on the vertices so that the plane is no longer flat the interior edge can be seen. If the vertices is moved one direction the edge is exposed and appears as a corner making the surface convex, but if you move the vertice the other way the object becomes concave. Most of the time when doing low poly modeling it is highly desirable for the object to be entirely convex, not ever concave and so it is necessary to be able to rotate the interior edge to make a concave surface convex as it should be. This is easy to do in 3dsmax for while the edge is invisible you can simply turn on the option for the individual object to view invisible edges and then select that edge and turn it. But in blender the situation is different for in blender not only are interior edges invisible, but primative objects begin not with triangle surfaces, but rather quads, and you can not select interior edges of quads in blender. So then you must convert the surfaces to triangles before you can rotate edges. I recommend converting all the faces of the primitive cube into triangles, but you can do each face individually if you prefer. First you create your primative cube (or use the default one), then enter “edit mode” instead of “object mode.” Now use the “face select” button to select the face you want to convert to a triangle. Then use the menu near the “edit mode” option (it’s near the bottom of the screen) and select “Mesh, Faces, Triangulate faces” (or just press Ctrl+T) and the face will become a triangle instead of a quad. Now you can switch to “edge select”  and you can select the edge you want to turn. Now you can turn it with “mesh, edges, rotate edge cw (or ccw)” as needed. As I said before I would suggest that if you are starting with a primative cube to do your modeling that you convert all the faces to triangles before you begin editing the model. This will give you a nice primitive that you can save as a starting part for low poly modeling.

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