Hi, Gang~

I am a member of CGCookie and I am currently following a tutorial on modeling a Greek temple. In the tutorial, the instructor makes reference to "dupe faces" and I have been unable to find out what he is talking about. In the tutorial, for example, he uses dupe faces to lay down a set of roof tiles. He also used it for other parts of the tutorial for making a lot of duplications of columns and triglyphs. I've searched the wikis and Blender documentation but find no reference to dupe faces. It is causing me some serious agonizing because I am at the point of finishing the project and I am ready to start laying the roof tiles. I have watched this portion of the video about 30 or 40 times trying to decipher what he is doing, and I am at a loss. He talks rather fast and opens a lot of dialog boxes which he fails to explain why he is doing so. I realize they have a time restraint on these tutorials, but this is just ridiculous. It is my biggest complaint w/ CGCookie. (Or is it just my lack of skills and my senility?:D) If anyone has a clue and can steer me right, I would be most appreciative...

TIA

C~

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.4/Manual/Modeling/Objects/Duplication

...and in 2.6x:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Modeling/Objects/Duplication

But the question begs asking - are we referring to deliberate duplication of faces or:

http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/blender/double-sided-faces-different-materials.php

Do you have a link to that tutorial? Might go have a look real-quick... - ETA... never mind, found it.

BTW, agree with you: videos are great but sometimes do move much too quickly, and you can't index them (well, you can, sort-of, but it's awkward) and it's virtually impossible to search a video.

A transcript from the video where he explains "dupli-faces":

"Now, what we want to do is duplicating this column, and turning it into our temple. And this in the form remains some interesting elements of temple. So, it's going to be duplicated a lot of times. Start duplicating this through the use of dupli-faces. What this does is create a duplicate using the mesh, and for every face in that mesh it creates another instance of that object using inocculous column."

Well, that's the closest I could make out. The underlined bits are best-guess - I live in Australia, and we do have a lot of Pommies who live here, so I've gotten a bit more used to their speech pattern, but even I can't make out what the exact words are, here. I must have played the video 28 times or more, he spurts words rather than say them, and for this sort of thing really obscures at critical moments, particularly when the accent is unfamiliar and one can't easily read between the lines.

Which defeats the purpose of the video.

For those making videos: slow down. Speak more distinctly. Don't contract words into a blur of incomprehensible consonants, leaving those of us trying to "get this" to figure out what the vowels might be.

I haven't seen the tutorial as I'm not a member at CG Cookie but Dupli Faces is a feature located under the Object panel labeled "Duplication".

Dupli Faces

Dupli Verts

Having not seen the video, just in case it isn't mentioned - to turn your duplicated objects into a single mesh for uv mapping / texturing select the parent object and press Ctrl+Shift+A.

@LaurieA - thanks for the link - think I have gone over it about 100 times before! :D

@RobynsVeil - Appreciate your help. Yes, I agree, their narration leaves much to be desired. And it didn't help much with his Brit drawl and pronunciation. Curious, Robyn - where did you get the transcript? Having it could have saved me needless hours of fussing about. I like the tuts on CGCookie, but I am considering dropping my citizen membership just for these reasons. These guys are either seriously into coffee or have access to a lot of meth. Being damn near blind doesn't help much either. You would laugh yourself to tears seeing me with a magnifying glass and my face in the screen trying to decipher what is going on! It's hell gettin' old...

@keppel - your links helped save the day. I have done a lot of searching just for these documents, even going so far as using Bing! You're the best...

Here is the results of a lot of frustrating hours of labor. It is assembled in DAZ Studio 3, which is extremely easy to work with, is backwards compatible,  and gives me no fussing about to fit textures, flipping normals, on and on. I now will texture it (UV mapping done) and decide what to do with it...

Nice work, Charlie!

The transcript? I wrote it... well, that bit. I'm not that masochistic to transcribe the entire thing.

I've actually addressed the video-vs-pdf thing with BlenderCookie folk in the past - they said they'd look into it. Thing is: the younger set prefer videos over pdfs, and since they appear to be in the vocal majority, kind-of leaves us oldies trying to figure out what's going on half the time. Mind you, saying that I must admit that for certain things video can be quite revelatory, something that would take volumes of text to describe. What Andrew Price has done with his Nature Academy series is probably the very best approach: the premium version included a pdf of each lesson. That pdf made the extra amount well worth it - and believe me, I can imagine it would be a fair job consolidating the video to text: it's not just a transcript but fleshes out the course significantly.

Too bad it's for Blender Internal, which is slated to be side-lined at some point.