Planet Blender

I’m out and about today,and that means that I’m carrying about my nice old Packard Bell laptop. It’s as old as the hills and doesn’t have much under the hood, but with Puppy Linux installed it is just as powerful and a whole lot quicker than my XP laptop.

It doesn’t however seem keen on recognising my Bamboo graphics tablet, and Wacom only includes a Windows driver on the installation disk – boo hiss, don’t they know Linux is the future, etc, etc…

Anyway this means I’m working on the outside view of my spaceship with the mouse, rather than sketching interesting aliens into the internal areas, like in my last post.

And of course, as usual, I almost imediately ran up against a problem that I couldn’t solve. The wings on the spaceship were looking a little slab like. Well in fact very slab like.

I found a solution on this Blender manual editing page.

Separating (’parting’) Faces

Sometimes it’s useful to be able to separate a selection of faces from others in a mesh, creating a new object. To do this use the P-key.

To remember this shortcut, I like to think of ‘P’ as representing ‘part’. New objects will be automatically given a new name based on the name of the original object. This function can be found in the Mesh->Vertices menu at the base of the viewport or under the spacebar menu.

I couldn’t for the life of me work out how to do this just by clicking random buttons in the blender mesh editing interface. Why on earth is separating faces in the vertices menu, oh well.

Here are the spaceship wings duplicated moved away from the main spaceship mesh by grabbing and moving along the z axis and then seperated.

And finally here with the wings rounded and moved along side the main spaceship mesh.