Hello and welcome to blender model scale.
In this video we will discuss how blender has its own units called blender units and that's abbreviated
to be you.
Now these blender units themselves can be defined as several other units as well so MM inches centimetres
etc..
We're not going to use that in this particular section because it can have some it's quite severe knock
on effects if we don't realize the scale or your model is set to and you're either exporting it or indeed
bringing us into another scene you think it's one size to bring it across.
That's something we'll leave until a later section.
Now blender units the scale works really well between zero point zero one.
And 100 blender units.
Now it doesn't matter what those units are whether they're millimetres or kilometres.
That's the stair within blend of that bill.
We will be working too.
And what they apply to now rule of thumb is use that grid floor as a stage and we have a look at that
in close detail and selecting an order of magnitude suitable for the level of detail.
So if you were modelling the planet Earth but you were modelling a solar system you wouldn't need perhaps
have it that big at all if you were on the ground and you were modelling a mountain you'd have far more
detail.
And if you're on a desk and you've got loads of things close up to the viewer of course you're going
to have lots more detail there as well.
So let's go explore blender units now and the way the blender scales things over in blender.
Hey so now we're over in blender.
And I'm Michael from the future that you know.
Yes I've come back to this lecture to give you some better information and you may notice I'm now on
a Windows computer.
It doesn't matter.
This just shows you the uniformity of Blender's interface across multiple platforms.
So some things may be ever so slightly different but don't worry that won't change what we're doing
here.
So zooming in and out now you can see as we're zooming backwards and forwards we've got a scale we've
got this grid floor on the ground.
Now this grid floor can be controlled if I press the nta to open up the properties panel and scroll
down.
There is an option under display for the grid floor you can turn off if you like or turn it back on.
Area go on and off.
You can also change the red and green axes and you can even put the blue one on as well if you want
it to leave it as defaults.
But you can see here we can change the whole scale of this as well.
If we wanted to.
Now I'm not going to touch that I leave that as fall all the time.
Just give me perspective of how large my model actually is.
So let's take the real extreme.
Let's go ahead and select our cube and scale it all the way down.
So on a scale two point.
Zero zero one if we Oh I completely mashed the keypad here.
If we look down in the lower left we can see the scale that's being applied now.
I can't see that very easily at the moment.
If we try and scale to it will run out of zoom your do this lots during the first time you use Blender.
You can't zoom any further it seems to run out.
Now we can use the shortcut here or we discussed this later as well under view.
If I get my mouse in the right place on the view we can view selected and we can see the number pad
full stop.
If you've got one can be used as well so if I go ahead and press that we zoom all the way in now.
Now we're able to zoom it's reset zoom so we can see zoom in and out accordingly.
Now you see the issue here there's clipping.
Now we can change this as well we can change at what point the camera clips the objects.
But at the moment it's just too close to the camera.
Now that is a problem because you can't model effectively if you can't get close enough.
And this is what I mean by if something is too small then you can't work on it.
Less less than this and it's just useless as far as I'm concerned.
I'm going to undo that to bring the cube back up to real size or the default size rather.
And now I'm going to scale it this time by a hundred.
Of course I could scout about ten thousand.
Now let's zoom out and you see here we get zooming issues at this range as well.
And again we can change the clipping but if you've got a scene this big I mean this is this is a huge
cubits 200 blender units across.
There's a pretty large cube.
Now you can see the surfaces inside here.
Now you may want to make an environment on those walls for instance if you want to that's one example
of making something this big.
But you can see that if you were making a model much bigger you start getting the clipping issue.
But on the other end rather than on the low end on the high end now you can change that clipping issue
on the display once again.
If we scroll up or in the properties panel we scroll up just a little and go to the view.
We can actually change the clipping distance the end and the start.
But once again I wouldn't bother playing with those unless you really really needed to be.
So we can bring that back into view now by increasing that in scaling the Senate back to a thousand.
And that itself will control the clipping.
But that means you're going to go outside not sort of like the normal operation range of blender.
Okay so there's one final thing to go over when it comes to blender scale.
This queue here is to blender units by two blending units by two blender units in size.
Now what does a blender unit really mean what it can mean anything okay can mean a centimetre it can
mean a metre It can mean a kilometre can mean lots of different things.
In fact we can actually pick what it means.
So we go over to the properties window on the right hand side.
If we go to the third tab along with seen properties we get an option to switch the units.
Now notice at the moment the length says None.
Okay so if we switch this is it currently says meters yours may say something else if you played with
this in the past.
If we switch it to centimetres we can see that the units scale everything scaled down to a hundredth
of what it was before.
Now if we have a look at the 3-d edits of you and now we zoom out we see that the grid floor is disappearing.
So we've gone a hundredth of the size which sounds great.
But hang on a minute.
We've now made this grid floor huge.
And we can pick loads of other things as well we can do feet inches kilometres.
Also notice that all of the all of these Dyne mentions all of the distances have all changed to meters.
So we got two centimetres at the top here.
This is one millimetre to 10 meters.
The location is zero zero zero.
And gravity now has meters per second on it.
If we go back to the length here and switch it to none we just see we get arbitrary scales.
Now by default blender units are kind of one meter.
It's as straightforward as that and we see it sits in the scene.
But equally you could have worked in feet but the units don't really matter.
And it's difficult to get across.
Now they certainly do matter of your if you put things into the real world you don't want.
So you were 3D printing something and you accidentally made it a kilometre long Maybe a huge 3-d Printer.
However when it comes to working in blender itself changing the units can cause a bit of a problem because
if you start mixing and matching units across different projects when you go and import them they will
look different.
They will be different sizes and they won't we won't be able to homogenise bring all your components
together easily.
If you've made them at different scales.
Now that said if you do choose to change the units be aware that they're under this tab and you can
change them back to meters or whatever you want or indeed just go to the length and sell it to none
again.
And we see all these change where we see that the lens has gone from 35 millimetres back to thirty five.
So it's one of those things that I'm not going to delve into deep details within the rest of the course.
I'm going to leave mine as just blending units.
And the reason for that is so we don't get any confusion.
If you change it and then start importing things into a different model or appending models together
it can be very confusing if you got nothink noted down on where the scale is.
Now with that in mind noting things down just want to give you a very quick tip we can change one of
these windows or create a new one and agree to create a new one from the propertys panel and just drag
it down along the switch the type of that window over to a text editor.
Now once youve got a text editor open you can actually type in this field now.
You may wonder why you can't type anything in.
Well like most things in blender you need a click new first.
I'm going to bring this out so we can see whats going on.
Notice Weve got new here.
If we go ahead and click on you now we can type which is excellent.
However what you should know is if your cursor drifts elsewhere on to a different window youre not going
to be able to type anymore so do bear in mind is as you typing away wave you nudge the cursor as in
your mouse cursor to somewhere else thats not over this window you will cease to type.
Of course you can say that along with your project and make any notes as youre going along which may
or may not be useful depending on the project you are working on.
So in summary there a blender model scale can be very confusing at first.
When you first get round to modelling but the important takeaway is that if youre modelling something
very very large like a planet modelling it at real size might be a bit difficult.
Blender just won't cope with that very well.
On the on the other side of it of course if you've got something very very small trying to model that
at an accurate scale is also going to cause you problems.
So depending on what your modelling you may need to enlarge it or shrink it so that you can work on
it with ease.
Now of course it's time for a challenge.
It's Challenge time.
I'd like you to now think of the order of magnitude that you'll be working with.
So I've filled in part of this chart so you can get an idea of what we're working to our first column
here.
The object is a real world object.
And I've put it's real size here.
Now obviously you will find ants and grasshoppers that deviate from these sizes.
I'm one point six meters tall so I have based my human on that.
Now that's actually quite short in so in some cases.
So you know these are just general real sizes not exact.
And I have gone through the motions of which where my scaling it.
Am I scaling it up.
Am I going to keep the scale kind of the same so one meter equals one blender unit or am I going to
reduce the scale.
Pause the video now go through this list give it some thought about how big you would make this object.
On the left in blender.
Okay welcome back.
This is how I would do the scaling myself.
So let's start from the car the cars about four meters long in general and I keep the scaling the same
in blender.
There's plenty of scope to do millimetre level stuff all the way up to the metre scale there so that's
absolutely fine we can keep that the same.
And similarly with the house you can keep that the same as well 10 blender units 10 meters absolutely
fine.
Obviously some houses are smaller than that and some can be much bigger.
But that's absolutely fine.
Next is an oil tanker.
Now we start to get into the realms of very large objects here.
Now a real sizeable tanker could be in 400 meters or so.
Some are even bigger I think.
But you certainly scale that down you would not work on a scale of 400 in blender as we sin when you
when you approach 300 you start having problems anyway.
So I would scale that model down now I'd either scale it down by a factor of 10 or 100.
And that depends on the level of detail that I want.
So in this case I get it down to four or maybe keep it up at 40 if I wanted that extra level of detail.
It depends on its end application.
Our bridge right Golden Gate Bridge is nearly three kilometres long for instance but you wouldn't want
to make it three kilometres long in a blender 3000 blender units.
That's going to be crazy.
So you would scale that down and again depending on the level of detail you need it you could make it
three blender units if it was something you were reviewing from a distance in a game or just a low poly
model of it I suppose.
But if you wanted more detail you probably bump it up to 30 blender units.
So it would be slightly larger than our arm grid that we start with but that's absolutely fine.
Now finally the earth.
Now that's a big big object.
Twelve thousand kilometres.
And it obviously we're going to be scaling that down.
But how far.
Again it depends on the level of detail.
I certainly wouldn't go any larger than 120 and I'd probably keep it around 12 unless I needed an excess
amount of detail.
But once you start needing a lot more detail one of the things to remember is you can always produce
another model.
So for instance let's take this earth as a quick discussion point.
So let's talk about scale.
Level of detail and models.
So one model does not have to contain its old and use multiple models when necessary.
So imagine you're zooming in from outer space.
You're approaching the Earth.
Well when you're far away you can use quite a low low poly model of the earth it just needs to be a
sphere and then was zooming in.
So it's going to have to get more and more detailed at some point.
But we don't need to include all that detail.
On the one of the earth there is millions of miles away before we reach it and we certainly don't need
to include all the detail on the earth by the time we zooming in to the level of let's say a city known
as we go more and more detail.
We can focus on the bits that we need.
Now you would have to make multiple models for each level of detail but that's absolutely fine.
Think of the end in mind and you'd simply transition between these low detailed models to higher detail
when you need to.
Let's move on to the next lecture.