I'm sorry to be such an idiot, but is there an UNDO anywhere? Also, and this seems like a bug to me, but, when you hit the "A" key that is supposed to select/deselect all. It works at first, but then a few minutes into two different sessions, it stops working and a little counter box comes up, which keeps counting until I hit escape. Exiting and coming back cures this, but only for a while. And this third question may be more involved. I can't seem to easily get a view to render, without going to a lot of effort moving the camera manually. I've tried adjusting the view so the camera goes to my perspective, but it is zoomed too far in or too far out, and then I have to move the camera manually anyway. How do I get a good view in perspective and just get Blender to render that view? Dumb question, I know. Lastly, How do you change background colour? Thanks in advance for not thinking me too idiotic to live. I have bounced around the interface for a few hours now, and I'm barely scratching the surface, it seems.

undo=u key or juss press spacebar a new window pop's up go to edit it'll say undo as for the A key problim could be a bug camera question in my opnion thats the best way is to move it manually but mostley thats depending were you're 3d cursor is when u start blender lastley um i think if you put the mouse cursor down in the bottom window n hit the F8 key it chages to world view or juss press the whiteblue looking globe on the pannels bar. the best thing to do is to read the manual that comes with blender most of you're questions would of been answered in it juss my opnion though so i hope that help's

Welcome to blender! I can tell you that once you get over these questions, its a great program. In version 2.35(a), Ctrl-Z and Shift-Ctrl-Z are undo and redo. The A key CAN play an animation (the counter you see) but only if the shift or alt key are down with it. On question 3, let me know as soon as you have a good answer . I have been positioning the camera the hard way as well. Background color F5 look for a little globe with blue continents in the button panel press that. look for Ho rgb sliders. f12 for a quick render. The interface is a real bear, but is easy once you figure things out. I found the video tutorials stupendous.

Cool. Thanks, guys. I'll work on things in depth later, with your suggestions. The real world keeps me busy for the next few hours, and then, hopefully, I'll be able to give these things a realworkout. Sad news on the camera. I was hoping there was a kewl shortcut that I didn't stumble onto yet. As far as the a doing an animation, that appears to be the case, though I'm not pressing any buttons with "a", so it apparently is buggy for me. As far as background, I'm still just getting a black background. I'm in world. I've set colors on the HO, and it's still black. I've adjusted ambient and Ze levels, too. Ambient changes did what I expected. Ze didn't do anything that I could see. Woohoo. Control Z for undos. Sweet. How many undos by default? Anybody know?

OK, here's a rendering (somewhat toony) with default lighting and a number of attempts to get the background anything other than black. Still no luck on that. I upload this image, because it also is showing some faceting, which is no better or worse with the toony lines turned completely off. I'm still searching for a way to smooth the model, which is an imported .obj, originally made in Wings. I haven't found in the manual or on the interface where to smooth meshes yet. BTW, thanks for f12 for quick render. Nice shortcut.

I was going to show you a render with a picture as a background but for some reason Blender has decided not save renders today, anyway, if you go to the output screen, the left screen on the bottom, you will find an open file icon beside backbuff, click on that and your "work area" will fill with a screen that will alow you to select a picture for the background on your render, if you want a solid color I guess you could find a picture of a blank screen the color you want. When you have your picyure selected click on the button in the upper right corner that says select backbuf, then click on the button in the output screen named backbuf to activate it and you will have a backdrop in your render. You can also in the render screen select sky for you backdrop, it is by default a darkish blue background.

OK, several hours later, and you guys all are waiting to be bored stiff by my trials, so here goes: I discovered my apparent error on the black background: I had somehow toggled on the pre-multiplied alpha button. That nullified my background color. That's fixed, obviously. I have discovered formats and aspect ratios that appear to give me the desired size of image. That's nice, too. Also nice is the fact that I have gotten some oversampling settings that smooth the model pretty well -- not completely, but pretty well. Now I'm looking to see if I can apply filters to get this thing antialiased a bit better. Any help there would be appreciated. Toon shading relies on the edges, which I can go up to 255 on, and no farther. The results above are at the maximum edge setting. Not too bad, actually. I am getting a bit better with the camera, too, and the rotate command, which is similar, but not exactly like, Wings' alt>left click. Is it just me, or has the workability of this UI improved in the last couple of years? I couldn't get Blender to do squat a couple of years ago, and now, though I'm by no means looking at a decent workflow, I'm off to a MUCH better, faster start. BTW, I read that the multiple undos is new. That is awfully nice. I still haven't found the default number of undos yet; any help there would be appreciated. Learning a program from scratch is never easy. Thanks for all your help so far.

i think the number of undos is as much as hd space permits as its all saved on disk. about the smoothing did you set subdivision too? the higer the smoother

OK, the banister in the fore ground is the obj I imported from wings, I didn't take time to texture or anything, the cabin and the grond (and sky) are in a jpg picture I rendered in DAZ|Studio for use as a background in some renders there. Not great art but it does show the potential of a backbuf.

I forgot to mention that the cabin is a freebie I downloaded here from MAPPS.

nice but were is the compulsory poser nudy?? lol how did you do the back buf??

Coolness, ysvry. Found sub-d settings in mesh edit. Yes, that works. I'm going to try it at the office on my character tomorrow at first opportunity. Thanks. Undo question answered on another thread with that "drag-down" menu. Pretty cool. Have a great day.

I guess I could redo the cabin with a nude vicky standing in the door :) Backbuf feature is in the output screen, you have one icon to select the picture to use as backbuf and another to activate it. I wanted to put a sulky that I had made in wings3d into the pic but when I loaded it into blender it was set at weird angles and the wheels, tires and body were all seperate objects (so the wheels could be made to turn in animations) and it got to be a real pain trying to get it set right in the scene. I will get it done just not real soon.

I found a good way (for me) to aim the camera is to add an empty and set the camera to track it. then I move the empty and the camera around in the ortho windows and watch the camera view in another window until I get it like I want it. I'm glad to see that Blender is catchin' on around here. There's so much it can do. ;o)

An empty? Sounds intriguing and pretty cool, but I don't quite understand. I think Blender is getting very usable now. However, I will say this. I've been trying smoothing via catmull-clark, and I keep crashing my system when I get the numbers up towards 6 (which I'm thinking must be the max). At 1 and 2 and 3, which didn't crash the system after activating sub-d, I'm not noticing any difference in the faceting of the model. I had a bit better luck on a simpler model last night. I was able to see the mesh visably smooth, but most of my models aren't much simpler than this one, so I'm not sure how things are going to work. What methods do you guys use to antialias? I see gaussian function, but I can't see that it changes anything in the rendering, so I may not understand its purpose clearly. I could try for a bigger rendering and anti-alias by reducing the image, but that will increase render times. Just curious. Believe it or not, I'm wandering through what documentation I can, but I'm having difficulty finding answers to specific questions. Have a great day, all.

An empty is nothing more than a point in space and it doesn't render in the final image. Tap the spacebar and select empty from the add menu. It will be displayed as a small xyz axis. Deselect everything, rightclick the camera then shift+rightclick the empty. With both selected hit CTRL+T and select constrained. Now when you move the empty the camera will track it. Simple. :o) As far as the OSA I don't think it can be set to render any finer than 16. I'm not sure about that one.

I've never used catmull-clark sd past '3' (my PC would probably explode, lol). Are you hitting the 'set smooth' button after ? As far as anti-aliasing, it depends on the lighting set-up too. Nick

I'm a newbie also, and I'm interested in getting somewhere with this program. So I'll throw my input here. Maybe I'm adding nothing new. Smoothing: If you select your mesh. By right clicking on it. Then press spacebar.Highlight Edit. Then highlight and select Enter Edit mode. Then spcebar then edit then vertices. then smooth. Then Exit Edit mode. Hope this helps (someone).