I'm wondering if anyone else is/was confused by the fact that the blue arrow representing depth is shown pointing up in the viewport? It seems to me that depth should be pointing away from the user and the arrow for "x" should be pointing up. I thinking I'm beginning to see though that "x" and "y" are like tiles on a floor where you would have length and width only and depth is what I would normally think of as height.
Somehow I've got to conceptualize this in my mind because right now, everything seems upside down. Does this make sense to anyone or did anyone have the same problem?
I honestly don't look at or use the coloured arrows. I just intuitively know X and Y as forward/back/left/right along the grid and Z as up/down from the grid. I use the keyboard shortcuts for these whenever I move anything... G for Grab, then X/Y/Z to move along the axes, S for Scale, E for Extrude, R for Rotate. Those are the four commands I use the most. All will work with the XYZ coordinate command afterward to lock it to a single axis.
I did a lot of map creation during my Quake days, so I'm pretty familiar with the 3D coord system.
Many thanks for the reply Sarlock! This is apparently yet another case where my limited background in canvas painting is not only not helpful but actually detrimental.
What you said is helpful and perhaps I'm over thinking this and should just practice trying to make something instead of trying to get all these concepts in mind first.
I found the best way to get more familiar with blender was to take existing objects and play with them. I downloaded a lot of the pak128.Britain blender files and manipulated them to get used to the commands what can and can't be done.
Here are the blender files for my three creations thusfar:
http://www.elvenorder.com/sar/images/simutrans/res_08_06.blend (http://www.elvenorder.com/sar/images/simutrans/res_08_06.blend)
http://www.elvenorder.com/sar/images/simutrans/sfc.blend (http://www.elvenorder.com/sar/images/simutrans/sfc.blend)
http://www.elvenorder.com/sar/images/simutrans/cityblock1.blend (http://www.elvenorder.com/sar/images/simutrans/cityblock1.blend)
Go ahead and download them and play with them... break them, change them, see how I did stuff. I'm by no means a professional, I made a lot of learning mistakes with my awkward face and vertices choices and some of my textures aren't quite right... but fortunately at 128x128 most of those little errors just disappear ;D
I figure after I do another 100 models, I might start getting good at blender :)
You can also use my camera and lighting setup for anything else that you decide to create. It's setup for orthographic camera at the right angle to create the 2:1 pixel ratio on the edges.
Sarlock! This is nothing short of wonderful! Thank you very, very much. It will be extremely helpful!
That's because we start drawing the cartesian plane on paper with only x and y, we do the x in horizontal and y in the vertical. But when we add the z axis we tend to just add the z axis going "inside" or "outside" the paper.
But on 3D and on the coordinates of the Earth the z axis is the height. This is to keep the x and y coordinates from a plane map. When you see your location on a plane map you have the x and y coordinates, y going north-south and x going east-west. But when we want to tell the height (altitude) it's the z axis. That's why it goes 'up'.
Thank you An_dz! You have confirmed what I was thinking, what looked like had to be true. This concept, as simple as it appears now, may have caused a lot of people trouble with Blender because a lack of understanding causes nothing in the way of location of the object to make sense.
excuse me.
Can me on say what for building in the blendfile it?
Greenling, I'm not sure I understand what you are saying. I'm going to guess and say you are asking what am I doing a Blender file for. If this is the question, the answer is I'm simply learning right now, nothing specific in mind.
roads
i have ask what for a building in the blendfile it.
Greenling, this is funny!
I'm a hillbilly and I assume you are German so you know what happens when a hillbilly meets a German? They can't understand each other!
Maybe VS or Fabio or someone can interpret?