In this tutorial, we’ll look at how to measure objects and distances in Blender. We’ll look at features built into Blender and the Caliper script (created by Dolf Veenvliet, aka macouno).
The Caliper script can be downloaded at:
http://www.alienhelpdesk.com/python_scripts/caliper
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- .blend file at the state of the tutorial
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13 Comments
Awesome. I always had trouble with that. Even though I’m in the metric system where 1BU=1 meter, I sometimes get models the size of a planet, and size and scale are really important for consistency in your work, especially with particles and textures I think…
The scale can influence lighting, especially if you’re using a physically based renderer like Luxrender. Dynamic systems like fluids can also be affected. From the demonstration videos I’ve seen, Blender 2.5 is going to have a setting so you can tell it how large 1 Blender unit is supposed to be.
Nice plugin, wish I’d known about it a year ago
View local!!! (numpad /)
Oh my god I’ve been trying to figure out how you’ve been doing that in your tutorials. Great Tip for clearing up the clutter when you’re modeling.
In an attempt to do this (before I knew this shortcut) I was selecting the object I wanted to focus on and then inverted the selection. Using “Ctrl I” and the “h” to hide them.
Your method is soooo much faster.
thanks Kernon!
Nice overview of this script. Really useful for making sort of blueprints.
Btw I suggest to download it and more with the “blender 2.49b script bundle” (2,45 megs).
Thanks for introduction this nifty external tool Kernon. It seems to be especially useful for architectural modeling and I’m not sure when I’ll be able to make use of it but it’s nice to know it. Thanks to Dolf Veenvliet also.
It is very useful for me. I use Blender at my job, I make architectural and design visualisations, and I often need to measure some distances and provide some dimensions. It works fine.
Very nice thanks for sharing
this is a very helpful script, but the results sometimes are strange.
for example, if I measure the distance between two vertices in a standard cube (just added before),
than it displays “1m 99cm 10mm”. this is not wrong, but quite misleading.
it should simply display “2m”.
You can adjust the level of detail in the measurements so that it will round up to only display “2m”.
@ kernond
thank you kernond, now I found out how to make the right adjustments!
great script, but imho it should be a standard feature in blender.
Great!
I like to do architectural modeling and this will come in handy.
BTW, maybe this should be categorized under tips?
Hey nice to stumble on this. Great to see people are still finding the script useful. I hope I’ll find the time to do a nice new version of it for Blender 2.5, and I expect that it should be possible to make it more user friendly/dynamic then as well.
Dolf
Hi macouno,
have you found the time to port this useful script to 2.5 yet?
Cheers,
orrence.