Talk:Modeling with Blender
Blender as KCL/OBJ viewer
I'm new with Blender and I played with it and want to use it as KCL/OBJ viewer. But every time I open a exported KCL model, the viewport is much too small. Zooming only does not help and so I had to change different factors every time.
Are there any settings to start with a much larger viewport and to allow a larger zoom-out? And where I can find these settings?
-- Wiimm (talk) 12:11, 22 July 2020 (UTC)
- I tried using Blender as well but when I tried to import an OBJ file, nothing did show up at all in Blender even when the OBJ file was imported, it is something that I also need help with, I tried zooming in and out but it hasn’t helped in that regard. It would really help me if there was a way to get an OBJ file to be imported properly, given I struggled with it. -- Octanevinny (talk) 15:03, 22 July 2020 (UTC)
- I would advise to take a look at the top bar after importing your model. It shows the number of faces, vertices, etc. If these values are zero, something went wrong while importing obviously. In that case, you can try different importer settings. However, if Blender tells you there is a fair number of faces and vertices, the model has likely been imported correctly and your only problem is the viewport. In my response to Wiimm on this same page, I gave an explanation on how to set up the viewport. You could try to follow that. -- MrKoeikoei (talk) 21:57, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
- Hey there. Mario Kart Wii models are rather large for a software that uses more conventional units like metres. Consequently, Blender's default clipping distance is too small to display these models right away. The simplest way to get an adequate 3D view is to press shift + C and subsequently adjust the clipping distances right after importing. Shift + C will set the viewport zoom to a level at which the full model should be visible, which is a nice starting point to adjust the clipping distances. The clipping distance settings can be found in the number panel. To show this panel, press N on your keyboard. Clipend is the most important setting here, although changing both settings (clipstart and clipend) will probably give the ideal result. To get a good view of the model, the clipend setting usually has to be increased by a few orders of magnitude. I would recommend a clipend of around 1000km, which should work for most MKWii models. To prevent seeing too much flickering of intersecting faces, the clipstart can be raised (to around 100 metres should work fine). Now the model should be visible already, but there are a few more hotkeys that I think are worth sharing. The first one is numpad-5, which switches the view between user perspective and orthographic. Furthermore, the user perspective allows you to use fly mode (shift + F), which is really useful to navigate through your model. Since MKWii models are quite large, you would probably want to press + on the numpad to increase the zoom speed.
- Since you are probably analyzing a lot of models, I can imagine your follow-up question would be how to change the default clipping distances. Unfortunately, I do not have an answer to that. I do however know that Blender is open source, and allows for execution of user-written Python scripts. To make life easier, it might be worth looking into Blender's API to see if there is such a (rewritable) variable. If that's the case, I guess it won't take more than just a few lines of code to automate this.
- Please keep in mind that all the hotkeys I mentioned are were hotkeys for Blender 2.79 and earlier versions. Blender 2.8 came with new key configurations and I do not know what exactly has changed (I am used to the older configuration). This should not be a problem, however; different hotkey presets are available in the preferences. I just wanted to give a little side note in case these shortcuts are not working for you. -- MrKoeikoei (talk) 21:57, 23 July 2020 (UTC)