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Blender 3D

Quick mesh troubleshooting tips

Whenever you have any strange mesh behaviour, start by:

• applying object level scaling;
• removing doubles; and
• recalculating normals.

(Do these, even if you are sure you don't need to.)

You sometimes get a cleaner UV unwrap for a hard-edged object by using conformal unwrapping instead of angle-based. But conformal unwrapping is more sensitive than angle-based to the exact location of the seams, and can go horribly wrong if they are not well placed.

When baking texture from a high-poly object to a low-poly one:

• for a normal map, the low-poly model must be smoothed, otherwise weird things happen at edges;
• make sure that the image you are baking to is not simultaneously being used by the high-poly object.

Matthew Collett's Blender stuff

• The UV Unproject camera resection (matching) script.
• A tutorial on rigging a piston.
• A series of tutorials on making working springs:
  1. a simple animated spring;
  2. an improved animated spring;
  3. rigging for the game engine; and
  4. dynamics in the game engine.
• An example of a single UV layer shared between two materials.
• A couple of short video clips of mechanical systems on Vimeo.

Other Links

• Blender.org, the official Blender website.
• BlenderNation, the major Blender news site.
• BlenderArtists, a popular Blender discussion and support forum.
• BlenderArt, an online Blender magazine.
• About the 3DMagix and IllusionMage scam.
• Back to my home page.