The half rod goes in the square hole
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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This was made for me
Blender is so powerful but by golly the user interface has such a huge learning curve.
If only it were as easy to use as the old Google SketchUp (no idea if it is still any good ever since it got sold off).
Go try blender versions before 2.5 for a laugh, it's impressive how much usability improved around then. It's still a juggernaut of an application though so I doubt it'll ever get easy to use. Sure did get easier though.
The pain is real. I'm currently losing all of my texture painting work when I shut the file. I have no idea why. I save everything twice.
Texture painting (and any images in general) are saved as separate files in blender by default! They're not saved as part of your .blend file. You can press alt+s while your mouse is in the image viewer (or just click the image dropdown menu at the top of the image viewer, which should have an asterisk if your image is unsaved) to save the image.
Alternatively, you CAN pack the images into the blend file! Under the file menu in the top left, select external data > pack resources. Then, whenever you save your blend file it should ask if you want to save the image too. note: you DO need to have saved a separate copy of the image first for this to work, but you do NOT need to keep the separate copy after you've packed the file.
From the depths of my soul, thank you. I tried finding a solution yesterday but they were all really old and not working.
No problem, anything to help a fellow blender artist! While there's a very good reason blender does images like that, it's admittedly very unintuitive and could definitely use some updates to make it clearer.
I can't really complain, it's an amazing and free program. I just wasted 4 hours trying to figure it out though. Their UI has gotten so much better over the years, it's not bad for beginners. But it's still not great once you get into the weeds. I'll never understand why move is 'g' and I'll never understand why you can still use the menu instead of nodes, but you have to push the dot for color to get the image texture. There's some seriously quirky things. Again, I would recommend it to everyone, but I still get grumpy sometimes.
I certainly can't explain most of those quirks, but at least I can tell you 'g' is for 'grab'!
Lol, I know it's for grab, but every other program that uses 3d or otherwise has a hotkey of 'm' for move. I just don't get that choice.
I could've been packing my textures in this whole time???
I know right? I only found out about it when it was mentioned in one of the recent update videos! It's a godsend for asset exporting!
This was a very satisfying read, thank you both. 🙂
Yay learning
Such joyous, look at all that joy