I'm pretty sure Mike's bowling pin is 3.8 meters tall?

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#1

I thought dimensions controlled the actual dimensions of an object, in blender units/meters.

Wouldn’t this mean that Mike gave us the wrong instructions by creating a cube that was 3.8 units of dimensions in every axis, meaning his bowling pin is the height of a one story building?

Something else that caught me off guard was the incongruency with the image texture size and the dimensions, however i think I’ve figured out what was wrong with it. Its that the size is reflective of the image width, and not height.

Here you can see my bowling pin texture size to be 12.1 cm, the proper width of a bowling pin as stated by google.

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^ This ALMOST lines up perfectly, but if you zoom in, you see the image is a little taller. This would be because presumably, Matt made his bowling pin slightly taller height in relation to its width when he rotated it 1 degree sideways in the lecture, and the image i used is different in that its not rotated but instead symmetrical via edit in photoshop by mirroring its left side.
(Edit: just noticed in ben’s video the bowling pin looks like it is slightly taller still, so that might be a factor too; this might mean that the width-height ratio of the pin image was never consistent to begin with)

#2

I think I see where Mike flubbed up. He made it 3.8 meters, but what he meant was 0.038 meters, the official height as stated by the United States Bowling Congress.

Unfortunately blender is stubborn in that if you enter 0.038 units it makes it 0.38 units, because it fills in 3.8 cm, even though you wanted 10 times that amount -_-

You can type in 38cm to get the correct value.

This is what screwed me up when i tried to make a cube the correct radius unlike Mike did initially, but i kept getting the wrong values, which made the solution to the problem take much longer to figure out.

@Michael_Bridges should patch this lecture to avoid the problems and confusion.

Note that i did have my blender set to meters mode, which according to mike is the same as meters.

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#3

I noticed that too, thought it was me.

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#4

what about 0.0 does blender not understand lol? This is a problem with attempting to over-simplify things sometimes.

And yeah he could of at least mentioned what he was referencing.
Not a fan of the misleading your followers teaching style they use if thats the effect he was aiming for. Just confuses people who have half a couple more senses.

Better to demonstrate what your are doing or prepare them for sudden change later instead of preparing for a moment with faulty code or practice. Unlike the teacher, we are UNAWARE of this change. While i appreciate the effort, this comes across as not cunning but unrefined.

#5

this also means I win when it comes to exporting the model into the game

And I can push objects around using the physics handle ben showed us in the unreal course xD

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hoping for an explanation of how the normals disperse light soon, orr i.e. why it looks so blocky.
I know ben played around with materials to get this effect in the unreal course.

Edit: Oh wait, Ben gives that explanation in the same lecture:

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Lookin smoother :slight_smile:

#6

I recall this lecture, I make it 3.8 BU because working at 0.038BUs or 0.038BUs would be too small would be a real pain an cause camera clips and general interaction issues.

At the very end you can scale the Pin by 0.1 to be the “correct” size if you’d like. I say “correct” as we are talking about BU not realworld units. You can convert it to real units if you need to of course.

If you do nothing to BUs then other programs often see 1BU=1m and so does Blender for things like physics etc.

3.8BU is a valid scale as is 0.38BU or 38BU. As long as you are consistent with your scaling and if necessary covert it at the end if working with other packages or models that’s OK.

I do make a mistake with the radius / diameter of the ball but we fix that when the mistake is noticed.
Some mistakes are left in to demonstrate how to fix them when they do come up.

I appreciate some students do not like this approach and they would rather the teacher be 100% perfect and make no mistakes which is super easy to do in post production, but ultimately doesn’t show you how to fix common issues that happen all the time to beginners :slight_smile:

#7

The only problems I ran into working in this scale was when making the bezzier curve, the arrows were too large and took up much of the screen, but fortunatly i could still see well enough to make the pin anyway.

Any zoom issues i run into I just press the “.” button and this usually fixes it.

Wouldn’t you have been better off simply changing your units to CM? This way you can still type larger numbers and it will always be in CM.

It is obvious you can scale a model if its an incorrrect size, but wouldn’t doing such be a sloppy fix for a proper course like this?

The video is still misleading people into thinking these are the correct units, and this confuses them greatly because they don’t understand why such a large unit is correct.

If it wasn’t a big problem i wouldn’t have posted about it.

ANY mention of this scaling problem in the video would help others that come to this video in the future.
AT LEAST some admission of mistake.
That is all we need. That way we do not scratch our heads thinking we are stupid when the units are incorrect after all.
And some of us go to the additional trouble of figuring out why we dont understand it (Like i did), and going to investigate with a bunch of headaches.

#8

Ahh I do apologies I had the wrong end of the stick.

Modeling at a larger or smaller scale and then scaling up later isn’t a particularly sloppy fix it is more a work around to maintain a workflow that doesn’t fight the software. If you ever try modelling something very large or small you’ll see what I mean.

I have just watched that section of the course again and I can only apologise as you’re right there is nothing that explicitly says that we are working at a 10x scale and this does need to be in there.

I shall look at putting in explicitly that we are working to a larger scale in the lecture where the reference material is imported. At the moment it is only implied.In addition a reminder or two throughout that we are at a larger scale.

I have just checked switching Blender to using cm, it does unfortunately still cause viewport clipping

Thanks for the feedback. - sorry for the headache!

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#9

Just one note if it isnt obvious, you are working with 100x the scale, not 10x :smiley:

Also you might wanna mention where you got your measurements from. You never say where you are getting the numbers from.
But I see they are the same as the ones that pop up in Google from the US Bowling Congress

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