Whoa! How long has that been there?

Okay, I have to confess. I don’t often get to watch Blender video tutorials. Which is a shame, considering how many wonderful videos have been produced in the last few years. But more often than not, when I actually get to sit at my computer, I am busily occupied doing something else.

So when I got my Zune, it dawned on me that now I would finally be able to watch some of the video tutorials I previously didn’t have time for. Which has turned out to be very cool indeed. I have been watching / learning Blender techniques while standing in line at the bank and the pharmacy and I even watched a bunch while camping a couple of weeks ago.

I have enjoyed learning all kinds of cool things from these videos. It’s amazing what you can learn just by watching how others do things. Even more amazing is that you often find out about tools or features you might have overlooked or somehow never heard about.

In fact while watching some videos by Claas Kuhnen recently, I learned about an amazing feature.

I was watching his video series on Organic Modeling and learning some very useful tips, when I got to the video on “Surface offset”. My mind must have wandered for just a second cause all of a sudden the object he was displaying (a simple, multi segmented plane) now had thickness to it.

Whoa! What’d I miss? Rewind! Play!

Oh wow, we have a tool that offsets your selection and creates new geometry!

When did that happen? Boy I really need to pay more attention to new features.

I was all excited seeing how this worked. Do you know how many times I have had to extrude, scale and then spend time tweaking vertices to get this very effect?

Coolio!

So I watch a bunch more of his videos and discover that Claus uses this feature quite a bit in his modeling work flow. And with every video I see, I get more inspired to play with it.

Finally, during a spare moment I decide I’m going to do a little playing with this cool feature. So I fire up Blender, add a cube, delete a few faces for interest and go to offset my surface.

Hmm, where is the button,… maybe it was a menu item… Sigh, I really should have paid more attention to that video… After spending 15 minutes looking for my cool feature, I finally grabbed my Zune. I’ll just watch the video again.

What the… LOL, well that explains why I couldn’t find it. Its a python script, ”Solidify Selection” and is found in Mesh>Scripts. Somehow I managed to miss that in every video where he talked about it. Which says volumes about my observational and listening skills (I so hate getting old ).

That also explains how such a useful tool escaped my notice for so long. I don’t often use python scripts. I know they can be very useful, but I somehow manage to forget all about them. Which means I rarely look in that particular file menu.

But seeing how useful this script is, I think I might just go explore what other scripts currently ship with Blender, then I might just go hang out in the python forum at Blenderartist.org for a while. No telling how many gems are hidden and buried in there.

Oh, and Claas, your videos are amazing.