Sculpt prims, can I get a professional opinion? (Never mind)

Josh Susanto · February 20, 2012

>Oh are we going to play the "we can build you a mesh that is better than your sculpt " game again? hehe

No need. You won that already. No question.

Josh Susanto · February 20, 2012

>The sculpt will be worth a single prim no matter what.

I assume that's the main reason people are still buying my sculpts, but I could be wrong.

Josh Susanto · February 20, 2012

>That may very well be, since I too am confused as to why you interjected (advertised?) mention of your of rocks and gates at all into this discussion about a hat. Whatever your reasoning was, however, that particular confusion could not possibly have had anything to do with the "cluster of prims" thing. That was mentioned a full three posts BEFORE your first appearance in this thread. Not sure why you thought otherwise.

The links don't work, so I really couldn't be sure what he was talking about. I just shared some of what I know about sculpts because the thread is supposed to be about sculpts, and because sculpts are what I make. If I had interjected a sculpt discussion into a mesh thread (or vice-versa), you might be making a stronger point here. The "cluster of prims" issue should have ended sooner than it did. When it was included in the title of one of the messages, it appeared to have escalated. The only reason I can see for that was my own discussion of cooking down clusters of prims.

>I'm not going to speak for anyone else, but for my part I'll say no thanks, Josh. If I want a fedora hat, I'll make one from scratch, and it'll take me five minutes to do. That's a heck of a lot easier than going in and reducing a nother model after the fact, whether the other model be a sculpty or anything else.

I wouldn't expect you to want my sculpt fedora. I expected the OP to want to grab it for free and then do basically the opposite of hold his breath for the mesh follow-up, but at least without my own failure to do anything to help him with the specific problem about which he asked in the first place.

>I thought we had gotten you over this limited thinking of yours, this stubborn instence upon sculpties as the foundation for everything, months ago. It's disappointing to see you've reverted back to your previous unenlightend state in this regard.

The system has reverted me. I was really looking forward to mesh at one point, but there has been no practical progress for the efforts I had begun to apply after that. The software still doesn't do step B on anything until I execute some kind of totally unstated step A, the mouse I need still essentially doesn't exist here (I have mostly been focused on finding one as step A), and the viewers still f### up my avatars, although they at least sometimes do not, finally.

>Uh, thanks for the announcement? That's about all that comes to mind to say, since I'm not sure what your comment has to do with the topic of this thread.

It's a sculpt question thread. What does a mesh discussion have to do with it either? I believe this is exactly where you and I started going back and forth with each other last time.

>Again, not sure what this has to do with this thread. Perhaps you should have made this its own discussion, Josh.

How about I cook down a fedora with the prim generator instead of making one in sculptypaint? Would that clear things up at all?

>Really? That strikes me as strange, considering I haven't heard anyone else complain about that particilar problem in months. When was the last time you tried, and which viewer(s) was it?

Exodus. Less than 2 weeks ago. Only it was worse than ruthie. It was ruthie and some kind of black fishnet alpha avatar with a gray hair thing sticking out of the forehead.

>First, a 3-button mouse can be bought for as little as $4 on Amazon. I realize economics are somewhat different in your country, but would four dollars really break the bank?

There's a 3-button mini wireless too small for any normal human hand for about $30 US. If people could easily get anything here from Amazon, they wouldn't be buying that. The one I saw had been opened and resealed, too, which is never a good sign here. I now have a bank account allowing me to order the thing, but Amazon won't deliver it here. I would need it directed to a US PO Box which I do not have, and then collected there by a private mail service. Total cost... you get the idea.

>Second, I did offer to send you one, if you recall. I've got a closet full of old keyboards and mice. Remember we talked about that?

I will message you a working delivery address, but I would like to pay you at least some nominal fee in Lindens on good faith. If nothing arrives, there will be no effort to recover the lost money.

> Did you miss the fact that there is an "Emulate 3 Button Mouse" option right in your user preferences?

I missed that bacause I was not told it was there, and thus did not look for it. I wa told I could "reconfigure", but it was not explained to me as a basic option. I was under the impression that it would be more of a hack. Glad to hear otherwise.

>Turn that on, and then you can just use alt+LMB in place of all MMB functions. Also, depending on what mouse driver you've got, you can probably enable MMB emulation globally, via your mouse settings in your Windows Control Panel.

Will do, thanks again.

>Somehow I suspect mouse availability has little if anything to do with your lack of progress since last we spoke. If you had been serious about wanting to make it work, you would have.

I am serious. I am not urgent. I've been waiting for friends and family to try to pick up a 3-button mouse for me when they go to the US, which happens every few months.

>We talked about this, ad nauseum for weeks on end, a few months back, Josh. Did none of that discussion sink in?

It did sink in. After trying both, I found that importing sculpts to Blender was still a lot easier than trying to build anything inside Blender. The main reason I didn't continue with that is that there seems to be no way to delete the parts of the model that don't need to be there. Or maybe they're deleted and they just don't show as deleted? How would either of these outcomes be particularly useful to me?

>First, do you not recall that after having come to understand how unfairly under-charged sculpties are, in terms of land impact, you emphatically stated that you had a problem with that in principle, and that you were no longer planning to argue in favor of taking advantage of that loophole?

I'm pretty sure that's not exactly what I said. What I intend to do is to stop taking advantage of that loophole when it's no longer necessary for me to do so. As long as it remains necessary, my other option seems to be not to create anything. If you thought that's what I meant, that's a pretty big misunderstanding, and I'm sorry if I may have encouraged it.

>Second, if land impact is now once again your only concern, after all that discussion about all the other supremely important factors that make for a good user experience in any 3D simulation, that's incredibly unfortunate. I really thought we had gotten through to you.

It's not my only concern, no. But it is a major concern. I'm increasingly disinterested in making things for which I can't see any justifiable angle in terms of land impact. If you see my recent geometric sculpts, I think it should be somewhat clear that I try to use all the available triangles unless there is a pretty compelling reason not to.

>Thrid, as others have stated, there's no reason a simple item like a rock or a grate needs to have a land impact greater than one (unless it's quite large, in which case it DESERVES to be more than one).

True. I'm trying to avoid making things that waste data. Not because you or anyone else thinks it's immoral, but because I should think the demand for things that waste data must inevitably begin to decline where there's any similar option that is more data-efficient in all circumstances. It helps that I have always tended to make things that are useful at larger sizes.

Chosen Few · February 20, 2012

Josh, I just dug through that closet, and uncovered three 3-button mice. I've tested all three, and they all appear to be in perfect working order. They're PS/2, so if your machine is USB-only, you'll just need to get hold of an adapter. I know I've got one kicking around somewhere. If I find it, I'll throw it in the box.

PM me your address, and we can figure out the shipping cost. Hopefully it won't be more than just a few bucks, and you can just send me that amount worth of Lindens.

In the mean time, do look into the emulation option. I must say I'm very surprised that you never discovered it. Did it not occur to you to just start looking around? It's right there, almost at the top of the preferences window. I haven't touched Blender at all since last time we spoke (and if you recall, that was the first time I'd played with it in years), but I was able to find it in 2 seconds.

Heck, if you just Google "3 button mouse emulation", a pertinent reference to Blender options comes right up, as the third link in the results. (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Non-standard_equipment#Non_three-button_mice)

Just a tad bit of intelectual curiosity yields tremendously beneficial results, always. Apply some.

Kwakkelde Kwak · February 20, 2012

Josh Susanto wrote:

I assume that's the main reason people are still buying my sculpts, but I could be wrong.

Possibly, although I think is has got more to do with your type of sculpts having little to no competition, like a lot of sculpts. They've been around since 2007 if I'm not mistaken, so it will take a while before all that content is replaced by mesh that looks just as good or better for lower costs or even much lower costs...and probably all the nonsense rumours about mesh, like "this would cost 8 times as much in mesh" (just kidding on that one).

Josh Susanto · February 21, 2012

>Josh, I just dug through that closet, and uncovered three 3-button mice. I've tested all three, and they all appear to be in perfect working order. They're PS/2, so if your machine is USB-only, you'll just need to get hold of an adapter. I know I've got one kicking around somewhere. If I find it, I'll throw it in the box.

Thank you for noticing the USB issue.

>PM me your address, and we can figure out the shipping cost. Hopefully it won't be more than just a few bucks, and you can just send me that amount worth of Lindens.

Whatever it is, I'm sure will be fine.

>In the mean time, do look into the emulation option.

Yes. It works very much as described. Why would that function not be enabled automatically? What's the advantage to users in not being able to do such a thing in the first place?

>I must say I'm very surprised that you never discovered it. Did it not occur to you to just start looking around?

I stopped looking around when I was unable to delete the same part of a torus by the same means as shown by the guy in the tutorial. Since I was already over my frustration budget, I decided there was no point int aggrivating myself further without at least the justification of having the right hardware. Until I have that mouse, I still won't really have the alt button hand to use Blender much of the time until my son goes to sleep, so that's likely to be less than an hour per night. I can actually sculpt and type just fine with one hand.

>It's right there, almost at the top of the preferences window. I haven't touched Blender at all since last time we spoke (and if you recall, that was the first time I'd played with it in years), but I was able to find it in 2 seconds.

I was able to find it easily on one of the preferences tabs once I understood that it is a built-in feature and not a hack.

>Heck, if you just Google "3 button mouse emulation", a pertinent reference to Blender options comes right up, as the third link in the results. (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Non-standard_equipment#Non_three-button_mice)

Yes. This seems to be a fairly common problem. Too bad I didn't get such an impression from our previous discussion.

>Just a tad bit of intelectual curiosity yields tremendously beneficial results, always. Apply some. **Only uploaded images may be used in postings**://secondlife.i.lithium.com/i/smilies/16x16_smiley-happy.gif" border="0" alt=":smileyhappy:" title="Smiley Happy" />

I think you've very seriously misjudged my intellectual curiosity based on this one Sisyphean technical example. That I have continued to be deterred by this process is a great testament to how actively the people providing this technology must be working to undermine their own communication to users of how things are to be used.

Carbon Philter · February 21, 2012

Pardon my interrupting, but poor Shotgun seems to have been sidelined a bit in this thread - not that the dialogue isn't interesting to follow.

Going back to basics, it looks as though the image is more akin to trying to create a surface texture to apply to the fedora rather than the sculpt map itself.

Shotgun -

Assuming your previous experience with sculpties and Blender to be minimal I will summarise from first principles given that you say you're using Blender 2.61 and expressed a wish not to pay for Primstar 2.

To create a sculpt mesh, the easiest thing is to use the Primstar add-on scripts in Blender which make the process pretty straightforward. No way round it. There are other methods but there is either cost or considerable effort required. There are versions of Primstar available from rel 1 which works with Blender 2.49 through to the latest version – JASS 2 – which you certainly have to pay for. You can however pick up JASS2 for free at the JASS location in world. This also works with Blender 2.49 but you can have 2.49 and 2.61 installed in separate folders on your pc and they will both work happily side by side.

So I would recommend getting hold of that.

You then start by loading a sculptie compatible mesh and move/manipulate vertices to achieve the shape you want and then do a ‘Bake Sculptie Mesh’ to generate a 64x64pixel rainbow coloured sculpt map. Export that to some folder, upload it to SL and apply it to a prim you’ve rezzed and set as Sculptie, and you should have a self made fedora.

Thereafter you then go through a second rather more tricky process to generate the surface texture which you then apply to the hat inworld exactly the same way as applying a texture to a regular prim.

There’s lots of info out there on Youtube and other places if you google but I would recommend you work your way through the Machinimatrix tutorials here: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/tutorials/

There’s a whole range covering the older and newer Blender interface and if you work your way through the whole tutorial section, including the older sculptie ones which is where I and I think many others cut their teeth on sculptie creation, you should have a good grasp of the whole process.

Rest assured you’ll continue to make mistakes and miss steps and probably swear a lot but it will all be worthwhile in the end and you’ll be able to follow deeper and maybe more obscure discussions on the process such as at least part of this thread.

Chosen Few · February 21, 2012

Josh Susanto wrote:

Thank you for noticing the USB issue.

No problem. I can't seem to find that adapter, though. I can pick one up for a few dollars, or I could just grab an actual USB mouse, for around the same price. I'm happy to do either. Let me know what you'd prefer.

Josh Susanto wrote:

Yes. It works very much as described. Why would that function not be enabled automatically?

In any program, the default settings are those that the designers of the program happen to like best. Sometimes, you as user will like the default settings for a given program, and sometimes you won't. All users, yourself included, have the option to turn preferences on and off, or otherwise adjust them, to make the program behave the way your prefer it to behave. That's the whole reason they're called "preferences" in the first place.

The bottom line is it really doesn't matter what the default is. YOU have the option to turn options on or off, as YOU see fit. Who cares how someone else prefers it? Go through the whole Preferences dialog, in every single program you have, and set it all up to work the way YOU prefer. That's what preferences are for. It's all about personal choice. Make your computer your own.

That said, to answer your question ask worded, I would imagine the reason MMB emulation is turned off by default is for either or both of two very simple reasons:

First, the vast majority of people don't need it. Most people do have a 3-button mouse. Just about every (non-Apple) computer sold off the shelf in at leat the last 10 years or more has come with one, after all. In fact, I can't remember the last time I even saw a mouse with less than three buttons on it (outside an Apple Store).

I realize you've said things are different in your country, for some reason. Do try to keep in mind what an unusual situation your'e in, compared to the rest of the computer-using world. When setting defaults, it does make sense to arrange it for the most common use cases. From there, those users who happen to have atypical needs can enable atypical settings, any way they want.

Second, it's important to realize that software evolves over time. The emulation option is probably something that was added in as a new feature at some point over the years. It's very often the case that new options are switched off by default, so as not to interfere with the existing habits of current users.

Chances are it went a little something like this. One day, somebody said to the Bender dev team, "Hey guys, it would be great if you could please add a 3-button mouse emulation option in your next release, because I don't have a 3-button mouse myself, and I'd love to use your program. Pretty please, with sugar on top, could you add that for me?" Somebody on the team then probably responded, "Sure, I'd be happy to do that," and then inserted the necessary snippit of code to make it work, without even giving any conscious thought to whether the default should be on or off. It's enturely possible off became the default for no other reason tha there happened to be a zero in a certain spot instaed of a one, and that it's just remained that way ever since, because nobody ever expressed a desire to have it changed.

Not every last thing is, or should be, a deliberate design choice, to which long drawn out thought is given. Some things are just put in on an as-is basis, and that's all they need to be.

Again, whatever the real story is, it hardly matters. The only thing that's important is that the option is there. You're free to enable it or disable it any time you want. This shouldn't be such a big deal, Josh.

Josh Susanto wrote:

What's the advantage to users in not being able to do such a thing in the first place?

If you really need an answer to that question, then here's one. Did you bother to read the popup tip that appears when you hover your mouse over the option? It clearly states that MMB emulation doesn't work if Left Mouse Select is enabled. So, if someone prefers to select with the left button instead of the right button, they'll have to forego MMB emulation.

I'd encourage you not to try to over-analyze such things, though. There doesn't have to be any rhyme or reason to why default settings are the way they are. They're just the way somebody decided was best, from their own point of view. Software developers are human beings just like you, and human beings often disagree on things. If you don't like the configuration as is, go ahead and change it so you do. That's why those options are there, so you can change them, no other reason.

Josh Susanto wrote:

I stopped looking around when I was unable to delete the same part of a torus by the same means as shown by the guy in the tutorial.

I don't know what tutorial you're talking about, obviously. What I do know is this is hardly the first time you've reported such difficulty in trying to follow along with what other people are doing. Needless to say, since these things do work for other people, the problem is not in the tutorial, and not in the software.

The way we were able to ease your difficulties before was for me to rewrite every single step in exacting detail, as if for a reader who'd never even touched a computer before, and then you went through and checked off each and every step as you performed them, until we stumbled across whatever part of the process you'd previously been missing. From that experience, I think I have a pretty good idea of what's going on with you, but I'm not going to talk about it in a public form, unless you say it's OK to do so.

Needless to say, most tutorials aren't going to be structured that way. People who create tutorials do have to assume a certain amount of prerequisite applied knowledge on the part of the student. If my suspicion is correct about your specific learning needs, it's going to take a certain type of additional initiative on your part, to translate these things into something more effective for you. That is a skill that you can develop. But again, I don't want to get into that publicly, unless you first say you're comfortable talking about it.

Josh Susanto wrote:

Until I have that mouse, I still won't really have the alt button hand to use Blender much of the time until my son goes to sleep, so that's likely to be less than an hour per night. I can actually sculpt and type just fine with one hand.

You hold your son all day long? Good lord, man, invest in a baby sling or a high chair or something! Otherwise, you're not going to have a spine left by the time he's three.

I'm kidding, of course. Far be it from me to tell you how to handle your own child.

I do have to tell you, though, if you're planning on one-handing this thing, you're going to be in for some hurt. Just about every 3D modeling application I can think of is designed with two-handed use in mind, no matter how many mouse buttons you've got. All kind of commands are meant to be accessed with one hand on the keyboard and one hand on the mouse. That's par for the course.

That's not to say it's impossible to work one-handed. It's just a lot slower and more tedious.

Take SL itself, for example. For camera control, and for object manipulation, it is expected that you'll have one hand on the alt, ctrl, and shift keys, and the other hand on the mouse. If you one-hand it, you're resigned to the on-screen camera controls, which are just absolutely gawd awful, and to having to pause to click radio buttons every time you want to scale or rotate something. You can get by that way if you really have to, but there's no way to do anything fluidly with just one hand. Everything is going to take far longer, and be way clunkier.

Modeling programs like Blender, Maya, Max, etc., all follow this same basic paradigm.

Josh Susanto wrote:

I was able to find it easily on one of the preferences tabs once I understood that it is a built-in feature and not a hack.

I didn't know it was a built-in feature either, until just yesterday. The only difference between you and me in this regard is I went looking for it, and you didn't. This is what I meant by "intelectual curiousity". Nobody had to expressly tell me that it was there in order for me to wonder if it MIGHT be there. That small amount of wonder prompted me to look around. And looking around was all that was required in order to find the answer. There's no reason you couldn't have done the same.

If you're not inherently hard-wired to think that way, all I can tell you is you'd do well to force yourself to make it a habit. That kind of investigation-centric approach is a very crucial part of what it means to be the most effective computer user you can be.

So you know, whenever you're looking for a configuration option, the natuaral first thing to do is to take a look at the program's preferences. Or you Google for it. Or you post a "How do I..." message on a forum. Nothing is hard to find, as long as you're willing to look.

Josh Susanto wrote:

This seems to be a fairly common problem.

I'd call it kind of sort of semi-common, at best. It's more of a "make sure the bases are covered" thing than anything else. My best educated guess is that about 95% of all mice in active use in this day and age have at least three buttons on them. Mice with less buttons are quite uncommon, by comparison.

Here's how I'm estimating that figure. Apple, which stubbornly insists upon a one-button mouse, has about a 5% share of the computer market, which means 5% of all mice that come with computers have one button instead of three or more. Deduct a few points from that, since not all Apple users are content to stick with the stock mouse (especially those who do graphics work). Next, add a bunch of points back in, to account for the fact that laptop track pads often have only two buttons. Then remove most of those points, to also account for the fact that most laptop users do carry an external mouse. Add all that up, and I think it's safe to assume that roughly 5% of activly used mice have less than three buttons.

Is 5% is "fairly common"? I'm not sure. But whether it is or isn't, I can't accept the word "problem" in this context at all, for two main reasons:

First, a 3-button mouse is such a mundange, everyday item, everywhere in the computer-using world. I don't know what's so different about wherever it is that you live, but I've got colleagues, friends, clients, and aquaintances in literally dozens of countries all over the world, and they've all got them. That includes people in impoverished nations as well as rich ones.

Second, as we've discussed at length now, the MMB emulation option is right there, for anyone who would care to enable it. This is true both locally in Blender, and globally from within most mouse drivers.

Josh Susanto wrote:

Too bad I didn't get such an impression from our previous discussion.

Indeed. But you have to understand, it seems your particular needs, in terms of point by point explanation, are unusual. As such, it's unlikely to occur to anybody what specifically you might or might not need expressly spelled out. It's just not possible for anyone to branch off infinitely, to fully outline every last item, in any discussion.

The supplied information in any conversation is merely a starting point. Your own brain does have to kick in from there. There will always be related things, not directly or fully covered in the discussion, that you'll need to pursue on your own, or at least ask about, if you don't already know.

This principle has nothing to do with Blender, as opposed to anything else. It's just basic operating procedure for the human machine. The fact that the topic in this case happens to be blender is inconsequential.

Josh Susanto wrote:

I think you've very seriously misjudged my intellectual curiosity based on this one Sisyphean technical example.

Sisyphean, really? I know you like your metaphorical references, Josh, but that one's just a wee bit overboard, don't you think? You really want to try to claim that the simple act of opening up a preferences dialog merely to look at what options might be in it is an insurmountable task? Are you not just a little embarrassed by that implication?

If t truly never occurred to you just to look, then I have to stand by my statement.; a bit more application of intelectual curiosity would go a long way.

In any case, I didn't say anything about high or low your inherent capacity for intellectual curiosity might be. I just stated you'd benefit from applying more of it than you apparently have been so far, when it comes to learning software.

Josh Susanto wrote:

That I have continued to be deterred by this process is a great testament to how actively the people providing this technology must be working to undermine their own communication to users of how things are to be used.

Nothing we've discussed here is unique to Blender, Josh, or to any practices of its makers. It's all just computer usage 101.

In our previous discussions, you were at one point all kinds of frustrated that nobody had yet explained Blender's import process to your satisfaction, despite the fact that the way it works in Blender is the exact same way it works in nearly every other program on Earth. Once you'd finally gotten it, after I spent days explaining it to you, you then couldn't figure out how to work the export process, even though it's virtually identical to the import process, and again, exactly the same in Blender as in nearly every other program. Do you see the logical failing there, on your part? It's not unreasonable for anybody to expect that you'd be able to take a principle from Task A, and apply it to Task B, without needing a full on re-explanation from start to finish.

As I said, I don't want to tred publicly on any personal territory that might make you uncomfortable. However, for the sake of others reading who might be discouraged by your overstatement of the complexities, I do have to say at least this much. If you have particular difficulty when it comes to the absorption and re-application of established principles, that's unfortunate, and you have my sympathies. I can only imagine how frustrating that must be. But you must understand that it's YOUR problem, and that it's not at all indicative of any failing on the part of those who teach Blender. Until you accept that, and quit trying to assign blame elsewhere, you'll only continue to struggle.

It's also worth reminding you, as we discussed before at great length, it's hardly fair to blame "the people providing the technology" for the tutorials that other people write and produce. If you've got a problem with a tutorial, take it up with the indivudial who provided that particular tutorial.

You appear to have a very unrealistic all-in-one outlook on things. All tutorials about Blender must somehow come deliberately and directly from the people who make the program. All preferences settings must somehow be deliberately arranged in harmony toward some singular purpose. That's a really weird way to look at the world. You don't seem to want to allow for the reality that lots of people are involved with these things, all of whom make distinctly separate decisions of their own, for all kinds of individual reasons, or sometimes for no reason at all. The world is a heck of a lot more complicated than you seem to want to believe.

Chosen Few · February 21, 2012

Carbon Philter wrote:

Pardon my interrupting, but poor Shotgun seems to have been sidelined a bit in this thread - not that the dialogue isn't interesting to follow.

You're absolutely right, Carbon. That was why I initially stayed out of the grates/rocks/etc. discussion for three days after it began. I tried to keep speaking toward the origninal topic. But after two days of silence from Shotgun, I concluded he/she must have abandoned the thread, so I jumped in on the secondary topic.

If you can resurrect the original topic, great. I hope Shotgun comes back, and that his/her problem can be solved.

Drongle McMahon · February 21, 2012

Maybe we could design a simple usb keyboard extension, with just shift, alt and ctrl keys, that can be attached to a small person in such a way that the holder of the small person can access the keys without letting go. There might be quite a market for such a device.

Oh dear. I should have kept it seekrit. Now I can't patent it.

Josh Susanto · February 22, 2012

I expect Carbon's instructions will work just fine.

But if Shotgun is sure about using sculpy rather than mesh, this seems like a very complicated way to get there as compared with using Sculptypaint.

Moreover, if you're going to go through all the trouble to produce a mesh object, just to finally load it as a sculpty, why not do what I agree with Chosen and Kwak would be a better use of that kind of data, and just produce a regular mesh object?

Josh Susanto · February 22, 2012

If Shotgun still wants a fedora sculpt, Shotgun just needs to say so.

Josh Susanto · February 22, 2012

>No problem. I can't seem to find that adapter, though. I can pick one up for a few dollars, or I could just grab an actual USB mouse, for around the same price. I'm happy to do either. Let me know what you'd prefer.

USB mouse. NOT small. Thanks. Please give me an extra-high estimate for the whole project. I won't know the difference and it will save us the trouble of trying to iron out any changes later. Whatever you come up with will be a good price as far as I'm concerned.

>Make your computer your own.

Technically speaking, it's not my computer :-/

>Again, whatever the real story is, it hardly matters. The only thing that's important is that the option is there. You're free to enable it or disable it any time you want. This shouldn't be such a big deal, Josh.

It's not really a big deal to me any more than not getting the mouse for a few more months would have been. OTOH, I am delighted to be using that function now. Thank you for spotting it.

>I'd encourage you not to try to over-analyze such things, though. There doesn't have to be any rhyme or reason

Clear, thanks. I use that explanation every day with my language students. I just tend to think that modern technological things will tend to be produced in a more reasoned manner than natural languages.

> Needless to say, since these things do work for other people, the problem is not in the tutorial, and not in the software.

They must work for a lot of people, yes. But, again, for most of the people for whom they would not work, the most likely response would be to quit in disgust, at least for some period of time. Instructions which lack an important step, if instead reported as a probably software bug, are most likely to be explored, not found, and dismissed as user error.

>The way we were able to ease your difficulties before was for me to rewrite every single step in exacting detail, as if for a reader who'd never even touched a computer before, and then you went through and checked off each and every step as you performed them, until we stumbled across whatever part of the process you'd previously been missing. From that experience, I think I have a pretty good idea of what's going on with you, but I'm not going to talk about it in a public form, unless you say it's OK to do so.

We can talk about it, sure. I don't have a learning disability. I have a rare personality type associated with selective high function. I'm used to a lot of things being very, very easy compared to most people. When something isn't easy, it's easy for me to think of it as bullsh## and forget about it because, usually, that will be the case anyway. Schenkerian analysis is an example I know we discussed before.

>Needless to say, most tutorials aren't going to be structured that way. People who create tutorials do have to assume a certain amount of prerequisite applied knowledge on the part of the student.

Yes. Now that I am able to emulate the 3rd button, I intend to scrutinize every frame of the tutorial to see if there's any tactical variable that might explain why deletions are possible in the tutorials which are not possible here.

>You hold your son all day long?

I hold him most of the time from when I'm able to log on until he falls asleep, and my wife normally comes home and takes control of the computer within a half-hour after that. I have to hold him while I sculpt because he knows when I'm sculpting and gets upset if he can't watch, and his responses to the sculpts are a pretty indicator of whether or not people will buy a thing. There's a lot of stuff I probably shouldn't have bothered to load, and my son tried to tell me so, and so I now pay more serious attention to that. It's win-win, except for the lesser incentive to continue struggling with Blender.

>I do have to tell you, though, if you're planning on one-handing this thing, you're going to be in for some hurt. Just about every 3D modeling application I can think of is designed with two-handed use in mind, no matter how many mouse buttons you've got. All kind of commands are meant to be accessed with one hand on the keyboard and one hand on the mouse. That's par for the course.

I can hit buttons occasionally while I have him, but I can't really hold them down. I have a harness, but if I put him in that, he tries to operate the keyboard even more agressively. I got him a toy laptop, but he wasn't fooled with that for long.

>That's not to say it's impossible to work one-handed. It's just a lot slower and more tedious.

Sculpting with one hand is just incredibly easy. And fast.

>Take SL itself, for example. For camera control, and for object manipulation, it is expected that you'll have one hand on the alt, ctrl, and shift keys, and the other hand on the mouse. If you one-hand it, you're resigned to the on-screen camera controls, which are just absolutely gawd awful, and to having to pause to click radio buttons every time you want to scale or rotate something. You can get by that way if you really have to, but there's no way to do anything fluidly with just one hand. Everything is going to take far longer, and be way clunkier.

That's how I've always done it. Mostly with my right hand, but sometimes with my left, instead.

>Modeling programs like Blender, Maya, Max, etc., all follow this same basic paradigm.

Which partly further explains why I haven't been using them, yes.

>I didn't know it was a built-in feature either, until just yesterday. The only difference between you and me in this regard is I went looking for it, and you didn't. This is what I meant by "intelectual curiousity".

The difference is what we're curious about and why we are curious about it. Things in the natural world that don't seem to make a lot of sense at first tend to pique my curiosity. Things that people decide to do a particular way that makes no sense to me are less interesting to me. Trying to make sense of what's intuitively obvious to other people is practically never productive. It's obvious to them because it's obvious to them, but the reason for which it happens ot be obvious is usually the opposite of obvious to them, much less to me.

>If you're not inherently hard-wired to think that way, all I can tell you is you'd do well to force yourself to make it a habit. That kind of investigation-centric approach is a very crucial part of what it means to be the most effective computer user you can be.

Evidently, yes. I believe that you are absolutely correct.

>So you know, whenever you're looking for a configuration option, the natuaral first thing to do is to take a look at the program's preferences. Or you Google for it. Or you post a "How do I..." message on a forum. Nothing is hard to find, as long as you're willing to look.

Here's one of the google searches I did when I first was told I needed the middle mouse button; "what do i do if i don't have a middle mouse button":

http://www.google.com.co/search?rlz=1C1SNNT_enCO408CO408&aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=middle+mouse+button#sclient=psy-ab&hl=es&rlz=1C1SNNT_enCO408CO408&source=hp&q=what%20do%20i%20do%20if%20i%20don't%20have%20a%20middle%20mouse%20button&pbx=1&oq=&aq=&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=&gs_upl=&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=f75cacdef9d66d74&biw=1639&bih=748&pf=p&pdl=500

As you can see, the second link is for a blender page.

If you search there for the text "middle mouse button" as I did, you see the instructions for loading a file without it. On the same page, you can nonethless see a later discussion of something which apparently has to be done with the middle mouse button, for which no alternate function is even mentioned.

This not only fails to mention the possibility of legitimately enabling some kind of emulation by the use of built-in system preferences, but it is also far from the first inconsistency I have encountered in Blender instructions, as you know. As a page, it would seem to say "don't worry about not actually having a middle mouse button until you actually need it for something, at which point you will need it and not have it; too bad."

If you follow the discussion of the middle mouse button on this page http://www.blendtuts.com/comment/12 and see how productive that turned out to be for someone who interestingly was not me, you can see how encouraged I probably felt after reading that.

Moreover, the correct order is not "In the Preferences, under Input, there's the option Emulate 3-Button Mouse." as stated there over a year ago without any further clarification. The correct order is FILE -> USER preferences -> Input (singular) (etc).

The word "Preferences" does not appear where implied, and did not appear, which is constent with what "Incompetent" had noted without then being given the correct information.

Not to disparage the person who had tried to help, or to try to castigate the Blender people for not making their totally free software even more idiot-proof, but "Incompetent" and I probably are not actual idiots. We probably just don't bother to take invisible steps which are blindly skipped over by people providing instructions.

>But you have to understand, it seems your particular needs, in terms of point by point explanation, are unusual.

Yes. But the problem is not that I'm not intelligent enough to decipher Blender's instructions. The problem is that this even matters only because I'm probably intelligent to totally use the sh## out of Blender once the instructions have been correctly deciphered, and you and I both know that. The average SL user might also have a trouble with the Blender instructions, but might not realize that because the tools, themselves would be about equally baffling anyway. Thus, anyone trying to help them could be more dismissive than people have been in my case, due to the fact that I already make sculpts which, even if not necessarily always the best, are of a quality that would nonetheless far elude the average SL user trying to apply similar tools.

>The supplied information in any conversation is merely a starting point. Your own brain does have to kick in from there. There will always be related things, not directly or fully covered in the discussion, that you'll need to pursue on your own, or at least ask about, if you don't already know.

I always assume there is always a lot more information not provided toward my desired end than provided. I'm fine with that. That's how normal learning processes tend to be. But providing information about later stages of a process without providing necessary earlier information seems like a potentially huge waste of time for people who don't happen to guess correctly what has been skipped over.

>Sisyphean, really? I know you like your metaphorical references, Josh, but that one's just a wee bit overboard, don't you think? You really want to try to claim that the simple act of opening up a preferences dialog merely to look at what options might be in it is an insurmountable task? Are you not just a little embarrassed by that implication?

The Sisysphus analogy would not mean that most of the individual steps in the process are each insurmountable. Indeed, Sisyphus tends to come practically to the end of the process before something causes him to fail. The irony is that he may be very, very good a pushing a rock up a hill. Just not good enough for that particular rock and that particular hill.

>I just stated you'd benefit from applying more of it than you apparently have been so far, when it comes to learning software.

APPLY it more, HERE. Yes. That is a fair point to make.

>Nothing we've discussed here is unique to Blender, Josh, or to any practices of its makers. It's all just computer usage 101.

There are MANY other applications that people warned me would be hard to use that I was able to use well without any direct instruction at all. With Excel, an employer asked me if I could use it. I literally said "let me see", and I found that I could. There are major usability flaws to every aspect of Blender I have been able to get correctly explained so far.

>In our previous discussions, you were at one point all kinds of frustrated that nobody had yet explained Blender's import process to your satisfaction, despite the fact that the way it works in Blender is the exact same way it works in nearly every other program on Earth.

That is certainly not true. If it were true, I would have been equally unable to use many programs which I have used quite routinely.

>As I said, I don't want to tred publicly on any personal territory that might make you uncomfortable. However, for the sake of others reading who might be discouraged by your overstatement of the complexities,

So far, the processes, themselves, have been not at all complex. What has been complex is the means of obtaining the correct explanations of how to do these things.

>You appear to have a very unrealistic all-in-one outlook on things. All tutorials about Blender must somehow come deliberately and directly from the people who make the program. All preferences settings must somehow be deliberately arranged in harmony toward some singular purpose. That's a really weird way to look at the world. You don't seem to want to allow for the reality that lots of people are involved with these things, all of whom make distinctly separate decisions of their own, for all kinds of individual reasons, or sometimes for no reason at all. The world is a heck of a lot more complicated than you seem to want to believe.

I do get that. I just think that it inevitably has to be a really bad psychological fit for a substantial number of people who would probably be intelligent enough to make good use of the tools if the means of even getting proper hold of those tools in the first place were even half as easy to make sense of as the tools themselves. My response has been to allow myself a certain amount of confrontation and frustration, and a certain amount of going about my existing, more productive business while waiting for a better opportunity to clear the next obstacle (which, in this case, has been the mouse problem).

Chosen Few · February 22, 2012

Josh Susanto wrote:

USB mouse. NOT small. Thanks. Please give me an extra-high estimate for the whole project. I won't know the difference and it will save us the trouble of trying to iron out any changes later. Whatever you come up with will be a good price as far as I'm concerned.

OK, get that address to me, and I'll head over to Best Buy or Walmart or something and pick one up. It'll likely be under $10. If you want the lowest possible price, I can order one from Amazon, but that will just take a little more time for delivery.

Josh Susanto wrote:

I just tend to think that modern technological things will tend to be produced in a more reasoned manner than natural languages.

It's easy to assume, when presented with any existing product, that the state it's in is the state it was always meant to be in, and that everything about it is the expression of singular purpose. But the reality is software evolves in much the same way as any language does. Both go through a never-ending evolutionary process, and both are the culmination of many people's efforts and contributions, some deliberate, some not.

Josh Susanto wrote:

Yes. Now that I am able to emulate the 3rd button, I intend to scrutinize every frame of the tutorial to see if there's any tactical variable that might explain why deletions are possible in the tutorials which are not possible here.

Good. Feel free to ask for help along the way.

Josh Susanto wrote:

The difference is what we're curious about and why we are curious about it. Things in the natural world that don't seem to make a lot of sense at first tend to pique my curiosity. Things that people decide to do a particular way that makes no sense to me are less interesting to me. Trying to make sense of what's intuitively obvious to other people is practically never productive. It's obvious to them because it's obvious to them, but the reason for which it happens ot be obvious is usually the opposite of obvious to them, much less to me.

That's interesting. I don't tend to draw such a distinction between the natural world and the human-designed world. To me, it's all the same thing. Humans are part of nature, after all, and we operate the same way everything else does.

When I want to know how something works, it doesn't even enter into my thinking to distunguish between natural and man-made. The thing is just the thing, and how it works is how it works is just there to be discovered.

If I want to intuit how a volcano works, I'll consider how what I know of simple physics most likely applies. I'll picture the molten rock at the bottom, being squeezed to pressurization by all the millions of tons of rock weighing down upon it from above. That liquid is going to be pushed SOMEWHERE, and if there's a crack or a weakness leading upward, well, there you go, volcano.

By the same token, when I wanted to intuit how MMB emulation is most likely to be enabled in Blender, I considered what I know about how programs in general tend to be organized. Long experience with all kinds of programs told me that just about all of them have a preferences dialog SOMEWHERE, and that that's where these kinds of options tend to be found. The path to the Preferences dialog in any program is almost always through the File menu or the Edit menu, So, the first thing I did was take a look at both of those. It turned out that in Blender's case, Preferences happened to be on the File menu. When I opened it up, I took a quick look at its layout, saw that it was arranged as a series of tabs, and I noticed right away that one of them was called "Input". Since a mouse is an input device, I knew that was where I should click next. And there you go, MMB emulation option, right there at the top.

Simple curiosity about Blender itself also led me to fnd second way of getting to that same dialog, about ten seconds later. Knowing that Blender's main interface consists entirely of editor panels, each of which can be set to display any type of editor in the program, I figured Preferences would likely also be considered an editor, and as such, would be accessible via the popup list of choices that appears whenever you click the little "Editor Type" button in the corner of any panel. Lo and behold, it was. I didn't mention this alternate pathway in my previous post, since I figured it would just be simpler to go with the File menu, and leave it at that, since that's how it also works in so many other programs. I just tend to prefer to talk about universally applicable solutions, rather than more narrowly specific ones, whenever possible.

Anyway, whether it's that volcano, or this piece of software, or anything else, it all boils down to just imagining what processes most likely went into the thing's current state of being, envisioning the pathways those processes probably followed, and then mentally following them yourself. I don't particularly care whether a given process happened to have come straight from the Earth or from some human being's mind. It's all the same thing.

Of course, where this intuition-based technique fails is when I encounter things that don't follow an envisionable road map like that. I then have to apply other methods of discovery and learning, which are somewhat less comfortable for me, like dry, brute-force memorization and such. Those are the times when I myself get mildly frustrated. It's never a showstopper for me, but it's not as pleasant. Thankfully, those instances tend to be rare. (More on this in a minute.)

Josh Susanto wrote:

Here's one of the google searches I did when I first was told I needed the middle mouse button; "what do i do if i don't have a middle mouse button":

I don't think that particular search link is appearing the same way for me as it is for you. The second link for me is not a Blender page, but an entry on some programmer's blog, about how mice are meant to have multiple buttons, and how Apple is silly for clinging to the one-button mouse.

In any case, asking Google full-sentence questions like that doesn't usually tend to work too well. The best strategy is almost always to distill your terms down to the main keywords, eliminating peripherals like "what do I do" and such. Those superfluous words just over-complicate the search, since it has to look for them each individually as well as collectively, and then the information you actually want gets buried amidst everything else.

What you want is a subject, and an action, nothing more. This is why my own search for "3-button mouse emulation" was effective. The subject is "3-button mouse", the action is "emulation". With just that, Google was able to pinpoint the information I wanted to see, right away.

Josh Susanto wrote:

Moreover, the correct order is not "

In the Preferences, under Input, there's the option Emulate 3-Button Mouse." as stated there over a year ago without any further clarification. The correct order is FILE -> USER preferences -> Input (singular) (etc).

Did you bother to watch the video? It sure doesn't sound like you did. Just reading the comments about a video, without actually watching the video itself, is a very silly approach to take when trying to learn anything at all. It's almost never useful. The comments only make sense if you've seen what the people are commenting on.

For the record, the author explains three different ways to get to the Preferences dialog, throughout the course of the video. He begins to explain the various Preferences options themselves at the 19:30 mark. All told, about 50% of the video is spent on preferences. If you didn't watch it, you missed out on a ton of very valuable infomation, all of which was quite well presented.

For me, the video got me thinking about ways to adjust all the preferences, to make Blender's control behaviors resemble those I'm used to from Maya. That's huge for me. The differences in the controls are really the only semi-significant barrier I have when it comes to trying to use Blender actively. Knowing that I can just rearrange/reassign a few things, and solve that problem, has me very happy. So, thanks for the link.

ETA: I just noticed there's actually a built-in Maya preset in the preferences. I went ahead and enabled it, and now almost everything about navigating in Blender feels right to me. Very little of it feels foreign now. Very cool.

Now let's talk about the comments you referenced. You seem to be implying that the phrase, "In Preferences, under Input," has to mean that Preferences itself is found under Input. If you take just those few words alone, entirely out of context, that is one possible interpretation of the text. However, it's very, very, VERY obviously NOT AT ALL what the author meant. Simple common sense makes it more than clear that the author was saying the option in question is to be found under the thing called "Input", which is itself to be found within the larger thing called "Preferences". Not to be able to see that, at least as a possibility, would require shutting down 90% of your brain.

I'm pretty sure If I were to say to you, "In my car, under the seat, there's a tire iron," you'd immediately understand that I'm not trying to say my car is located under a seat. Obviously, the seat I'm talking about is inside the car, not above it. "In the car" refers to both the seat and the tire iron.

So, why is it any different when somebody says, "In Preferences, under Input, there's the option"? The answer is it's not. By the exact same grammatical logic, "In the Preferences" refers to both the Input tab and the "Emulate 3-Button Mouse" option.

I'll agree in a very general sense that it might have been slightly better had the author spelled out the complete path, as you did. But realistically, within the context of that particular web page, there was absolutely no reason he should have needed to do that. Every single comment on the page, after all, was in response to the video, and the video itself explains the path, no less than three times. If you didn't watch the video, you've got no business trying to interpret the comments at all.

It's also well worth noting that English is not the author's first language. With that in mind, I'd say he did a hell of a job with all of his wordings.

Josh Susanto wrote:

The word "Preferences" does not appear where implied, and did not appear, which is constent with what "Incompetent" had noted without then being given the correct information.

Having watched the video, and having read through the comment thread, I have to say you're making quite a leap in your apparent assumption that this "Captain Incompetent" person made the same misinterpretation that you did. He/she posted exactly once, simply to ask were the Preferences dialog was to be found. He/she did not say or imply anything whatsoever about having mistakenly thought the author was trying to say Preferences was located under Input. All he/she said, was "Maybe I'm stupid, but where's Preferences?"

I interpret the author's lack of response to that question to mean, "Yes, you're stupid, because you didn't watch the damned video. Watch it, and then ask me a question that matters. Otherwise, you're just wasting my time, and yours."

Josh Susanto wrote:

Yes. But the problem is not that I'm not intelligent enough to decipher Blender's instructions.

I don't think it's a question of intelligence. It's more a question of style. Your default approach to seeking information is at odds with the manner in which most people tend to offer it. Since it's unrealistic to expect the rest of the world to change to suit you, it only makes sense that you alter your own approach to suit the world. I think you understand that, at this point.

Josh Susanto wrote:

The average SL user might also have a trouble with the Blender instructions...

Again, you're talking about many different things, as if they're all one in the same. The world is nowhere near so organized as you appear to keep trying to want to believe. There's no such thing a "the Blender instructions". There are literally thousands of people all over the world, each independently offering their own forms of guidance.

It will always be true that some students will jive better with some instructors than with others. That's to be expected with any subject. So, if a particular person isn't making headway with one particular Blender tutorial, or series of tutorials, there are countless thousands of others that might work better for that person.

To dismiss them all as identical is not only ridiculously narrow on your part, it's also somewhat insulting to the different individuals who all teach in different ways.

Josh Susanto wrote:

But providing information about later stages of a process without providing necessary earlier information seems like a potentially huge waste of time for people who don't happen to guess correctly what has been skipped over.

Just how do you expect an instructor to know what earlier information you skipped, Josh? If I'm trying to explain to you how to rez a default cube, I do have to assume you already know what a cube is, you already know how to navigate the basic interface to be able to push the necessary buttons, you know how to launch the program, you know how turn on your computer, you know how to use a mouse and keyboard, you have electricity, you can read and understand the English language, etc., etc., etc.

The line has to be drawn somewhere. If every piece of prerequisite information were to be explained in every tutorial, then every tutorial would be 100% identical, and would contain the entire sum of human knowledge. Needless to say, that's not what tutorials are for.

From everything you've said, all signs are your problem is you keep wanting to put the cart before the horse. For whatever reason, you've been unwilling to just start at the very beginning, and go one step at a time, all the way from A to B to C to D... to Z. You seem to want to skip over all that, start in the middle somewhere around point L or so, and then just cherry pick the information you think you want, out of lessons that you're nowhere near ready for yet. I can promise you, in all the years I've been working in this field and teaching these things to people, I've never seen anyone succeed that way, not one person, ever. It doesn't matter how smart or capable you may be; that's just not the way it works, period.

Like it or not, you're going to have to baby-step your way through it, just like the rest of us did. That's the ONLY way that works. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Josh Susanto wrote:

There are MANY other applications that people warned me would be hard to use that I was able to use well without any direct instruction at all. With Excel, an employer asked me if I could use it. I literally said "let me see", and I found that I could. There are major usability flaws to every aspect of Blender I have been able to get correctly explained so far.

With this, you remind me of myself, in eighth grade algebra. Right up until that point, I'd always been one of those kids who never had to study a day in his life. I could just intuit my way through every test, in every subject, and do well every time. So, I'd never had cause to develop proper study habits. I was doing just fine without them.

But all that changed when algebra entered the picture. All of a sudden, intuition was no longer the key. Although I was probably the smartest kid in the school, that no longer mattered in the slightest. This wasn't about smarts. This was about something else entirely, and I was failing miserably as a result. The first quarter, I got a D, and the second, an F. That F was the only one I'd ever gotten, and it hurt.

My parents went in to meet with the teacher, and she said, "He's relying on his intelligence to save him. But intelligence can't help him here. He needs to study procedures." She was absolutely right. Whether I liked it or not, the ONLY way I was going to succeed was to start at the beginning, take things one step at a time, just like all the other kids had always had to do, and walk through it all, without trying to run or jump. No longer could I simply observe knowledge from the top down, and intuit my way to the lower level answers. Bottom-up, real honest to goodness learning, was the only way that was going to work. My parents ended up hiring a good tutor, and with his help, I did recover.

I've never forgotten that painful lesson. Innate intelligence only gets you so far, no matter how much of it you've got. When something only works one way, you have to resign yourself to approaching it that same way, or you're going to fail. If that adjustment feels unnatural, so be it. If it's what works, you have to go with it, whether it's initially comfortable or not. Inevitably, your comfort zone does expand, the new method of learning becomes second nature, and you become a far more skilled learner.

I realize this mention of bottom-up learning may sound a little out of place, after I just spent a while explaining how I intuited my way from top to down to find the answer on the MMB emulation question. The only reason I was able to do that is because I've already been through the bottom-up process of learning the principles upon which these programs work. Armed with that experience, top-down intuition does work. Without that, it's a gamble.

Your experience with programs like Excel and such sounds just like my childhood pre-algebra experience. You're naturally smart enough to just make it work, so it does. But that kind of approach just plain doesn't work, when it comes to learning a full featured 3D platform like Blender, for the first time. Just like my 12-year old self discovered with algebra, there are specific types of thinking required for this, which your brain has never had to do before. There are procedures to memorize, that simply cannot be intuited until and unless you have proper frame of reference, which you don't yet have.

No matter how much you're brain might be trying to jump up to shout, "Turn me loose on the thing, and I'll just get it," it's not going to. For the time being, you're gonna need to tell that brain to shut up and take it like a man.

It's like if a world class marathon runner were to all of a sudden decide to compete in a weight lifting competition. Would the fact that he's a naturally gifted of an athlete mean he's automatically going to be able to life that 500 lb. barbell? No way. Until and unless he's been through all the steps necessary to train his body for that specific purpose, it's just not going to happen.

By the same token, even a world class mind isn't going to be able to operate a something like Blender effectively, without first having gone through all the steps that it takes to get there. The ability to intuit something like Excel just isn't direclty relevant. It won't help with Blender any more than the ability to run will help with lifting weights. Once the user has trained his mind specifically for the purpose, it will work, but not before then.

I hope that makes sense, and I hope it doesn't scare you. This stuff isn't hard. It just requires some new ways of thinking that you haven't yet had to do before, and that's going to be somewhat uncomfortable in the beginning. Embrace that discomfort, because there's no way around it.

Josh Susanto wrote:

That is certainly not true. If it were true, I would have been equally unable to use many programs which I have used quite routinely.

I don't know what to tell you on that one, Josh. File -> Import, and File -> Export are virtually identical in every program I've ever seen that has those functions, Blender included. I really don't understand why you see Blender's implementation of those functions as being different.

Josh Susanto wrote:

So far, the processes, themselves, have been not at all complex. What has been complex is the means of obtaining the correct explanations of how to do these things.

I think the problem is in your overall approach to it. There's nothing wrong with the means by which the information is presented, or the means by which it has been made available to the world. There does appear to be a problem with the means by which you choose to try to absorb it. That video you linked is a prime example. It's loaded with all kinds of great information, but you saw fit just to try to cherry-pick what you thought you wanted, out of the user comments, rather than watch the whole thing. That says a lot.

I'd strongly encourage you to rethink your approach. Start with the most elementary lessons you can find, and then let each one build upon the last. Forget all about whatever it is you think you want to know. You're not yet in a position to have any idea what you really need to know. Let the information flow, from beginning to middle to end.

Sculpt prims, can I get a professional opinion? (Never mind)

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