Some confusion about Blender Model Scale & The Challenge

Blender Courses Talk
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#1

I’m unsure if it’s just me being a dope or if some things were left a little bit ambiguous. I can tell this part has been modified already so it could be my failure to grasp the concept. I’ll try to illustrate my thought process so you can see how a layman might react to this section.

So if the object is too large or too small you get framing issues, that makes sense. I get confused when he says it’s best to work between .01 and 100 blender units because of two statements:

(A) “A blender unit can mean anything.” So this would mean if, at the start of a project, if I define my units as Millimeters, I could work between .01 and 100 millimeters?

(B) “By default, blender units are kind of one meter” This seems more like you can only work between .01 and 100 meters in a project. This contradiction (in my head at least) made the challenge confusing too.

Order of magnitude challenge.JPG1293×738 84.8 KB

The ant row only makes sense to me if statement (B) is true, because if I can redefine a Blender Unit as mm like in statement (A), would the ant not be between .01 and 100 BU’s? Why the need to scale it up?

The grasshopper row makes no sense to me either way for the reason stated above, and also the fact that 4cm is .04 m, meaning that should also be within the acceptable range .01 to 100 BU’s, if a BU is one meter as stated in B.

For that matter how would we scale an object as this challenge dictates? Just with the scale tool, obviously in object mode so it’s not automatically applied? Or using the “Unit Scale” bar in the “Scene” tab?

#2

Think of it this way…

We know that the ant is 2mm tall (so 5 or 6 mm long). Now if you model that ant as 2 Blender Units (BUs) tall and 6 BUs long then when you finish the job you have two options. A) you can include a note with the model export stating that the model is scaled to 1000:1 or B) you can reduce the model’s scale to 0.001 before exporting. Essentially, every part of the ant that you model will be 1000 times its actual size.

The same goes for the Grasshopper except that you’re only creating it 100 times larger than it really is.

However, the opposite is true for the Oil Tanker and the Bridge as you would model them at 1/100th of their actual size meaning they would need to be scaled up to work in a game.

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#3

Ok that is making a bit more sense. It’s mostly about compatibility with other objects in a scene and rendering an appropriate level of detail for the object’s function then?

On the other end of things if I wanted to 3d print a 2cm Cube and didn’t care about compatibility within other blender files, is there any reason not to change the units to cm at the start of a project?

#4

not at all. To be honest though, after my most recent experience with changing the units, printing the model would be the ONLY reason I would change the units. It’d be nice to think about these measurements in imperial units but it’s not worth the headache of having to scale everything every time I import/export a file.

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