See attached scene. Boolean simply fails to work. No idea why. I dont have lots of fancy modifiers involved as per previous threads and it is a solid object.
Also, is there a problem with selecting linked faces in version 2.68. When I try to either press L in edit mode or “select more faces” on the water object, it only selects a small area of the model and wont select any more, why?
Anyway, the main thing with this scene is I NEED to be able to have the “water” mesh which is inside the cube a seperate object from the mesh outside of it, if the object is too complicated for boolean operations, how should I do this?
Also: whats up with logging into the forums on firefox? I had to log in using chrome because it thanks me for logging in, but doesnt log me in, using firefox?
The faces ARE all the same object, when i click on the object in the outliner view, it selects all of the bits, so they are all one mesh. Even if it was lots of meshes joined together, I’d see the bits nested by expanding one object.
I have no idea what an n-gon or a quad is, all I know is these objects have faces, which are made up of edges, which stretch between verticies. I know nothing about blender topology either, I dont see how creation mountainous regions is going to help.
Also, I cannot scale or rotate the objects. They need a texture which tiles at a certain scale across their mesh, so have “global” and “cubic” mapping. If I moved they in any way, the textures would be out of line, plus i’d have to move the other objects in the scene, resulting in everything being extremely mistextured.
The unselected object is the actual water - FLUID, but its just making random “bars” of water throughout the object. The unselected object is a solid mesh also.
I didn’t say the faces are separate objects. They are separate meshes. Hover your mouse over one of them and hit the L key. Then hit G and move your mouse. You can do that with every single face.
Select all in edit mode, then hit W>Remove Doubles. Or select Remove Doubles from the tool shelf on the left of your screen. I can see the button in your screenshot there.
You should probably learn what n-gons and quads are if you want to do CG work. Quads are 4-sided faces. That’s primarily what you want your meshes to be made out of. Triangles are sometimes OK. N-gons are any face with more than 4 sides. You have a lot of them. You need to watch a few tutorials or read the documentation and learn some basic mesh editing so you can fix that.
Your objects are already scaled and rotated, you need to apply that scale and rotation (that is, set the scale to 1 and the rotation to 0). It doesn’t change the size or rotation, it just basically resets the current settings as the default. You do this in Object Mode by hitting Ctrl-A. Failing to do so will cause all sorts of problems for booleans and fluids alike.
There are a lot of possible reasons for your fluid to behave that way. First, the aforementioned unapplied scales and rotations are certainly contributing.
Second, you have incorrect expectations. Your Fluid object is simply an info holder that tells Blender the fluid’s initial position, size and shape, along with a few other variables you don’t need to worry about at the moment. The actual fluid simulation, the thing that splashes around like water after you hit bake, is generated from the Domain object. So you’ll still see your Fluid object in the 3d viewport after baking. The disconnected mesh is probably also contributing to the problem, and there could be other problems.
But the biggest problem is the fact that you’re already moving on to fluid simulation before fixing everything else that’s wrong with your file first. Don’t move on from one big problem to cause other big problems before you even bother to repair the first one.
Ok it seems like the “remove doubles” solves the problem of selecting the whole mesh. What I did was link select the correct part in a new scene, and seperate to a new material. I also applied the rotation and scaling stuff from the control-A menu, although that doesnt appeared to have done anything to the scene.
I have been using liquid simulation for months, so do know the domain object is where the liquid ends up :p. However this is the first time that its decided it wants to make random bars of liquid instead of using the shape as a volume. I have the resolution up pretty high on the domain mesh, its at 400. Theres no internal faces in the water-fluid object’s space for it to get confused with, so I dont see where the problem is being made.
From your description, I could convert this to quads, but the top of it is a flat surface which I’ll be decimating as its currently a wasteful grid of squares into one object. Can you advise what the proper procedure is though, I’ll at least give it a try. I went into edit mode on it, and clicked the mesh>faces>Tris to Quads option. Nothing happened but resimulating shows the problem is still there.
Your obstacle objects are all disconnected faces with lots of holes and zero thickness. Your fluid doesn’t know where it’s supposed to be. Obstacles need to be solid, manifold meshes with some degree of thickness (e.g. a cube has thickness, a plane does not). Right now you’re trying to hold up a river with cheesecloth.
Ahh essentially thats all I really needed to know, I will just use the exporter tool to export the whole world as a single mesh, without water, and have that as a invisible obstacle.
As a side note, these scenes are imported into blender from OBJ files, is there any importing options I could play with to automatically avoid needing to remove double edges from the scene?
I’ve seen some mention elsewhere that OBJs split edges in a different way than Blender, so exporting between the two sometimes breaks those edges. I don’t think I’ve seen a clear solution, but most of what I’ve seen has been in reference to exporting from Blender, not the other way around.
