I edited a mesh in Blender–and you can too

Last night, on In World Review, a major topic of discussion was how horrendously difficult Blender is to use. You can’t just install it and start playing around.

I tried, and it almost killed me. No obvious mouse gestures work. The menus don’t make sense. In fact, there are three different “View” menus on the home screen!

For example, one of the things we all would have liked to be able to do was to take an existing mesh and just tweak it a little bit. How hard can that be? I finally had to throw in the towel at 4 a.m. last night — I couldn’t even get as far as getting the mesh into Blender in a recognizable way.

But I’m not a quitter.

Today, I tried again, and again, and again, working through multiple tutorials, Googling around for the commands — did you know that keys have different effects based on where your mouse is hovering on the screen? — until I finally was able to take a public mesh, bring it in-world, edit it, export it, and successfully bring it into OpenSim and apply a texture to it.

Here’s what I did, and I hope this will save some people the two days I spent figuring it out!

1. Download and configure Blender

If you just download Blender, install it, and run it, expecting it to just work — ha ha ha ha! No. It won’t work. Because it’s designed by crazy people for professional designers who don’t want amateurs like us to be able to edit mesh — otherwise, they’d be out of work.  Like all those people who used to retouch photos for a living.

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