Adventures across the 3rd dimension

That sentence makes no sense at all to me... I'd probably have better luck getting the mirror thing to work.

Example.

You have an ear mesh sitting 10cm away from the center of the x axis. You want to have another identical ear mesh 10cm on the other side of the x axis. You select your existing ear mesh, duplicate it, then go to the objects properties and put a minus in front of the x position value (or you remove the minus in front off the value if there's one there - it depends on if your original mesh is on the positive or negative side of the axis). It will then take your duplicate and "scale" it across the x axis which effective takes the ear mesh and flips it to the other side of the axis. You end up with two ears that are symmetrical with one another across the x axis. 

The ear was exiting? Where was it going?

And I can see how that would move the item to the correct position on the other side... but not why that would flip anything?

Anyway, I just need to select that ear and recalculate the normals or whatsits. It just annoys me that I didn't check this before I joined the mesh of the ear to the rest of the mesh. (I should have UV mapped before joining too, but I didn't feel like it, so I'll probably hate myself once I start trying to texture map it...)

The thing that always catches me out is the way that Blender mirrors about the object's centre rather than the global axes so you always have to make sure that the object centre is at the origin and then only move the object via edit mode.

Charlotte wrote:

And I can see how that would move the item to the correct position on the other side... but not why that would flip anything?

Because the origin of the scaling operation is at the center of the world 0-x and the points are being scaled across one another until they are in the reverse positions to where they started (the points further from the axis are moving further than those closer to it). Negative scaling is pretty much how people have mirrored things across an axis for manty years.

what scaling operation? You said to change the position.... not the scale.

and Val, Blender (or at least Blender for artists) has both global and local mirroring plus interactive mirroring. Not that it ever seems to mirror the way I would expect, I usually have to try everyone twice before it does what I want it to do. Or I give up.

You are correct and I should have said to also change the scale negatively (so minus 1 instead of 1) as well as position I need to get a coffee.

Oh. And here I thought I was just too daft to follow

Nope it was my crap description of the process and cat interruptions (like now  ). To be honest the way I normally do it would be with the scale tool active at the origin and just type the negative value, then the scale takes care of the position side of things.

I'll try to remember trying that next time...

(Just now I think I need a coffee too, and I don't even like coffee... I just exported jpgs instead of pngs, then when I realised I re-exported - renamed the extension png but kept the export format jpg, and then I had the re-export everything all over again )