Question: What is the scale you use?

Hello Blender users. I was wondering. When you make models, what is the scale that you used? One blender unit is equals to how many centimeter, meters, or inches? Are there any reason why you use that scale?

Scale is arbitrary which is one reason to use Blender units instead of metric/imperial. Doesn’t really matter which scale you decide to use while modeling but it does matter when the model is finished; The finished model should have a real-life scale which is easiest to understand and maintain across multiple models in a scene. If nothing in the scene have a real-life counterpart, pick a reference.

For example, if your model is a giant space alien in a planet Omicron Persei 8 that you’re building, doesn’t really matter what the scale is as long it’s consistent with the other models in the scene. But if you pick the scale with a human reference, the whole planet is comparable to something familiar.

1 Blender Unit equals 1 Meter. Scale matters at render time for certain light calculations using certain render systems. I am thinking of Lux when mentioning this. But scales do shift when you transfer work between the various 3D applications (i.e. Maya, Max, C4D etc…)

So the default cube is roughly the size of a person.

I model every time in real size, no matter if real size working area is over 200meters, I do it same way. It is much easier to model, handle objects, when you have real reference, g 1.5 is 1.5 meter and you know that pilar is 1.5 meter rather than 1.5cm or 1.5mm.
Its common standard, ask any architech :slight_smile: (they use millimeters but still in real size).
Edit: my units are meters

I’m too lazy to change the scale, so it’s always on blender units for me. I guess you could change to metric or imperial if you wanted though.

1 blender unit = 1 meter. I use metric instead of blender units, I’m more familiar with seeing the cm mm km suffixes.

It’s easy, sane, and allows me to keep track of if I’m making things the right real-world size.

Thanks everybody. I was just wondering about it especially when I was doing some cloth sim. I’ts because the cloth don’t actually ‘touch’ the surface of the collider and even with itself (self collision) thus there is always gaps created in the simulator that would not exist in real world. That got me wondering about the cloth distance from the collider object in real life (if 1 bu = 1 m, the gaps are about 3 mm), and that got me wondering about the scale. I haven’t really think about scale while using blender, and all tutorials I read never mention a thing about it. Still, is there any advantage of say using a scale of 1 bu = 1 cm compared to say 1 bu = 1 m when modeling, rendering, or doing simulations? Does it somehow affect Blender’s ability or it is just doesn’t matter at all?

You can use any scale on your head if its gonna help you. 1 bu in your mind can be 0.1111cm or 1274km, Blender doesnt care.
One thing would help if you start model small things, set world units scale to 0.001, then all your moving actions, (G=grab, E=Extrude) will be in millimeters, so easier and faster to type.
World unit scale = 1
G 0.005 = 5mm
Wolrd unit scale = 0.001
G 5 = 5mm

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One scale that does usually matter is the object scale (object mode, properties panel (N), transform: scale). If it’s anything other than 1,1,1, it means dimensions in edit mode differ from what you see. Ctrl+A -> scale in object mode to apply scale.

I have heard that Armatures and Simulations don’t work too well at smaller sizes in blender. I’ve seen a few pics of people who use blender for character animation purposely scaling up their models.

I haven’t done many characters or cloth sims myself so I’m not sure how large one must make things to overcome that shortcoming.

You might want to think about the largest and smallest objects in your scene ahead of time and choose a scale appropriately. The problems happen when the extremes are already very small or large - and then an overall scale is applied…
Or when you start at a small size and then make smaller and smaller parts.
Keeping it in BU also avoids the very long exponential notations that sometimes clog up the number fields because Blender has applied some conversion factor.