Blender Quicktip: Wireframe Mode for Safety!

The Wireframe “Draw type” can be terribly useful for building complex objects, since it automatically culls all co-planar face edges, which is to say that flat areas are drawn as though they were single complex faces instead of the cluster of simple faces they really are.

This has one obvious benefit and one subtle one.  The obvious one is that you can see what the heck you’re doing when looking at a complex mechanical design.  The less obvious one is that when something is wrong with your mesh, wireframe mode will often draw a big bright white line where otherwise Blender might not give you any clue that skeinforge wouldn’t like a mesh.

Take these two objects:

One of them skins, one of them doesn’t.  Blender’s solid mesh vier renders them exactly the same.  However, switching to wireframe mode makes it pretty obvious

The cylinder on the left will not slice in skeinforge and in fact will spray errors like the dickens.  The one on the right will slice with no problems.  Both look identical in solid view, but here in wireframe, Blender knows that the top faces are not truly coplanar (they have infinitely thin slices in them) and so does not render them as a single face.  I purposefully generated this particular example by extruding the cylinder on the left with the “individual faces” option instead of the “region” option, but this and a number of other operations in Blender (including booleans on some kinds of meshes) can create invisible but lethal (to skeinforge anyway) kinks in the mesh topology.  In predominantly flat geometry, as is common with mechanical designs, the wireframe draw mode makes these errors stand out like a sore thumb!