P3D v5 Blender 4.0 - can no longer add single verts using CTRL-RMB

[Tim Collins]

I'm fairly new to Blender (trying to wean myself off SketchUp) and I'm following Bill Womack's tutorials to teach myself how to use it. I'm using Blender 4.0 which adds a little complication as Bill's tutorials are done in 2.79, but I'm doing other tutorials which do need a recent version so I do want to keep it all in the same one!

I've run into a problem which probably has a simple answer but I'm damned if I can work it out. I'm laying down taxiways in an airfield using the 'add single vert' method that Bill espouses. It was going fine and I've put down hundreds. Indeed I'm not far off completing the airfield. But I had an issue when I filled some polys, got some twisted planes and did a few undos, and now I can't add a single vert except by using the cursor, and then it doesn't add to the mesh that already exists even though that's highlighted in Edit mode. That means the verts aren't properly joined and can't be bevelled. What have I done wrong, and how can I recover to the original methodology?

The illustrations how the mesh, the area I'm working on now and the active addons.

 

[Tim Collins]

This obviously hasn't sparked enough interest to generate a reply - or no-one knows the answer!

Further diagnosis - it would appear that the mesh that is the airfield surfaces is locked somehow. I can add a new mesh (Add Single Vert) and add to it with CTRL-RMB. But I can't do that to the existing mesh. I can however select a vertex in that mesh and Extrude from it, and again from the extruded vertex, but if I now CTRL-RMB it adds a vertex on top of the highlighted vertex - and will go on doing so. The added vertices do not appear to be attached to the mesh I'm trying to edit. It doesn't Extrude to Cursor (which is what CTRL_RMB is supposed to do) even though it's saying that in the button tell-tale at the bottom of the screen. So something has changed the behaviour of Edit with respect to this Mesh.

I'd forget it and continue with a new mesh and merge them when I've finished, but it appears I can't merge this mesh with another one. So there's some setting I've activated for this mesh which is preventing or limiting editing. Any ideas what that might be?

 

[jgarnold]

I can't answer your question HOWEVER I note you are using Blender 4.0 and the Asobo exporter only works with Blender up to version 3.3.3 and IMHO you can't open blender files created with 4.0 using earlier versions. Maybe you won't be exporting for MSFS?

 

[Tim Collins]

I can't answer your question HOWEVER I note you are using Blender 4.0 and the Asobo exporter only works with Blender up to version 3.3.3 and IMHO you can't open blender files created with 4.0 using earlier versions. Maybe you won't be exporting for MSFS?

As you can see, I labelled the post ‘P3Dv5’. I do not develop for MSFS, and I have no interest in doing so. I don’t really care what the Asobo exporter does, and it’s not in any way relevant to my question - which is purely about Blender techniques. The fact that I’m making an airfield is itself irrelevant to the question; it just gives context!

I have asked the question in the Blenderhelp subreddit too, and the same deafening silence is apparent!

 

[jgarnold]

Sorry. I didn't read the label and only looked at it quickly when I noticed that there were no replies.
I always assume (when no one replied to one post I made in the past) was that no one knew the answer.
All I can then suggest is to go back to a previous version of your blender file (if you keep backups) and start from before you before you did the fill.
Best of luck as I know it would be frustrating that you could add single verts and now can't.

 

[Tim Collins]

As it’s the first mesh for the project, I don’t have a back-up (you’d have thought I’d know better by now!). If I can’t work out the answer and have to start again, it’s really just one day’s work I’ve lost. But I suspect the answer is actually very simple, which is very frustrating. I think I’ll try Blender Guru’s Discord and see if I can get an answer there.

 

[jgarnold]

Hang in there and wait a day or two is my only suggestion unless you can't wait that long.

 

[Tim Collins]

Hang in there and wait a day or two is my only suggestion unless you can't wait that long.

Haha! Yes, I can wait - though as I’m sure you know, learning a new app needs consistent exposure to make sure you don’t forget stuff! I’ve got another project on the go with the great John Young so I can keep busy, but I’ll keep trying to work out what’s gone wrong here.

 

[jgarnold]

I Became interested in your plight so did some investigating and what I found, well actually what I didn't find', was no Youtube tutorials on what you are doing and in fact the only tutorial I could find for taxipaths was for MSFS and that it performed in DevMode and looks relatively easy.

I also searched Youtube for p3d taxi and found nothing. In fact there are very few youtube tutorials for p3d. I also could not find anything in youtube for "Bill Womack" and an internet search only found information about a chap who was killed in a motorcycle accident.

I wish you the best but feel that you may never receive a response from anyone else.

 

[Tim Collins]

John, you are joking? Thanks for your interest - I do appreciate it - but the issue is likely to be a very simple thing to deal with in Blender. It may well be something that others haven't experienced, and I may have to wait a while till I find out what I did wrong, but I know it's not anything obscure.

Bill Womack is probably the best known of the scenery developers who've done YouTube tutorials. His Blue Yonder house has done more great sceneries than I care to list. Alongside Bill, we have Austin Sass, who started with GMax, moved to SketchUp and then to Blender. We then have Soarfly, who have done a huge number of SketchUp scenery videos. If you can't find these guys on YouTube, then I worry for your ability to use the satnav in your car!

There are others, and of course there are the wonderful developers who post here regularly.

I'm not an ingénue to FS9/FSX/P3D scenery. I am new(ish) to Blender. I know what I'm trying to achieve, and I know how to achieve it in older software - but I want to get better at using software that's likely to be around - and free - for a lot longer than GMax and SketchUp.

Bill: https://www.youtube.com/@BillWomack

Austin Sass: https://www.youtube.com/@austinsass6360

Soarfly: https://www.youtube.com/@Soarflyconcepts

Some examples of my own stuff:

 

[Rotornut44]

To add verts I have always done Ctrl-R, but that is technically for a loop, so it will normally generate one vert on either side of the mesh and slice between them. How I would do it though, would be to work in vertex select mode (which you already seem to be doing since you are moving verts around) and then select the verts on either side of there you want to have the new vert placed and right click and select subdivide (if you have the right-click menu enabled). Else, "W" then subdivide.

 

[jgarnold]

I am NOT joking. Place the words Bill Womack in the Youtube search bar and displays the first 'hit' at the top and nothing else (no other words other than Bill Womack) and the 'hits' listed under refer to someone with the same name who died in a motor cycle accident (displayed on screen) and so I assumed the top one was also something to do with the Bill Womack who was killed and so didn't click on it - not until just now and now I am 'enlightened'. I thought I must be going crazy. If I scroll down I then find Developer Month 2019: Bill Womack

Hey have you tried ADE? I loved ADE and used it heaps before MSFS came along.

 

[Tim Collins]

To add verts I have always done Ctrl-R, but that is technically for a loop, so it will normally generate one vert on either side of the mesh and slice between them. How I would do it though, would be to work in vertex select mode (which you already seem to be doing since you are moving verts around) and then select the verts on either side of there you want to have the new vert placed and right click and select subdivide (if you have the right-click menu enabled). Else, "W" then subdivide.

Yes, I’m working in vert select but the method I’m using requires the official addon ‘Add Mesh: Extra Object’ which you can see enabled in my original screenshots. This allows you to draw the object one vert at a time, and doesn’t need subdivision from a ‘starter’ mesh. It’s this functionality that I’ve lost for this particular mesh, and it seems that I can’t add to the mesh. Nothing is locked or otherwise disabled (as far as I can tell), and I can use the method for a new mesh within the project. However, I can’t merge the new mesh with the existing mesh, so I’ve definitely done something wrong!

I could start again from scratch but obviously I don’t want to risk the same thing happening again and effectively losing another day’s work to no end.

John, I’ve been using ADE since Jon first developed the program. I think I have over 200 airfields completed in it. Indeed, underneath this custom airfield surface in the simulator is an ADE airfield, and of course every airfield must use the FSX/P3D building blocks that ADE exploits. This process is about creating what is seen visually in the sim, not about the functional mechanics of the airfield.

 

[Rotornut44]

I have no idea what would "lock" it in the way you describe. If you haven't tried it yet, I would open another instance of Blender, select all model parts in your current project with "A" while in Object mode and copy then paste them into the new Blender instance. See if it behaves any differently after that. Should at least rule it out being a project setting.

Just a side note: you can usually find Blender autosaves in AppData\Local\Temp as long as you didn't turn them off or clean up Windows recently.

 

[Tim Collins]

Ah, that’s a great idea. I’ll have a go at that once I sit down at the computer later on - thank you. And I’ll have look for the auto saves too; they may help me work out what changed and gummed it all up!

Thanks!

 

[Tim Collins]

Sadly, copy'n'paste to a new instance doesn't clear the issue.

In the image below you can see a vert in the new instance highlighted. What you can't see is that I'm pressing ctrl-rmb at the tarmac corner top left and nothing is apparently happening. What should happen is it should attach a linked vert at the mouse cursor (which is of course invisible because I'm taking a screenshot using the mouse!). What's actually happening is that each time I make that selection, I'm adding another vert co-located with the highlighted one, which is not the correct behaviour.

If I now grab that vertex and move it away from the highlighted one over and over, I can drag out as many linked vertices as times I pressed ctrl-rmb....

Now I could arrange those verts where I want them and try and connect to the existing mesh by using Merge at Center. What happens if I do that is, instead of merging, it links the target vert with the free vert as though I'd pressed F! It's bloody weird! I'm wondering if I've somehow changed the default behaviour of this mesh.

If you're not familiar with the technique I'm using, Bill explains it from 2:20 - 4:00 in this video:

He's using Blender 2.79, so his input is Ctrl-LMB which is slightly different from Blender 3.x and later.

The last screenshot shows that I am able to use this technique for a new mesh, but I can't merge the new mesh with the corrupted(?) one.

 

[Tim Collins]

Well, I've managed to find a workaround by subdividing the mesh and moving the derived verts - pretty much as you suggested, Chris. I can't add a new mesh and join it to this one, so I'm still not sure I've got a mesh that I can eventually successfully export to MCX but that's the next step. The upside is that I've got much faster at drawing the surfaces and fault-finding distorted normals so, if I do have to start again, it shouldn't take too long to get back to this stage!

However, I have to switch attention to another, more urgent, project for this afternoon which means going back to SketchUp and my comfort zone!

 

[Rotornut44]

I was in that Sketchup boat for so long. I only began getting into Blender when I wanted to do some AO bakes for P3D. I never thought that I would be able to get comfortable with Blender, but I found someone to annoy and bounce multiple dumb questions off of and just ran with it. I haven't touched Sketchup in the last 3 years and I have no intention of ever going back. Importing Sketchup models to Blender, there are usually so many loose verts or split edges. The first few I brought over I had do a lot of cleanup on.

My new workflow with Blender is so much faster. What would take me a week in Sketchup, I can easily do 2x that in a day in Blender now. It's one of those programs that looks confusing up front until you start picking up the basics then it's really not too bad. What helped me a lot was keeping a cheat sheet (text document) with a bunch of my most commonly used Blender hotkeys or where to navigate to find certain things in Blender.

Back to your issue:
I grabbed a stand-alone of Blender 4.0.0 and tried the Ctrl+RightClick vert method on a new plane I added. It does work for me. It is a part of the mesh. So, it could either be a Blender preference setting you changed (Though, I don't know what) or maybe a conflicting addon? If not then I have no clue as I don't recall ever running into a similar issue.

To join two meshes, you could select both of them then go into edit mode and use snapping to snap one vert to the other with this option enabled:

 

[Tim Collins]

Yes, I get what you're saying, Chris. I brought a SketchUp model into Blender last week and reduced its size by 70% just by cleaning up the messy geometry. It took ages, and I still haven't learned AO or texturing yet! I am determined to get there, but right now I can work very quickly in SU and this project (which isn't RAF Benson, the one in this thread) only needs a few simple buildings.

I agree that it's likely I've accidentally changed a preference or some other setting that's causing this behaviour, but it seems to be confined to this mesh. I've confirmed that if I start a new object within this project then the method behaves as it should, but the new mesh won't join to the old one whatever I do. It may well just be simpler to start again, but I am both intrigued and frustrated by whatever is causing the issue!

 

[rhumbaflappy]

You could save a .blend file, zip it, and attach that to a post. Then nobody needs to guess anymore, and maybe a solution can be found.