A warning for Blender users that do I not actively read the
General Blender help thread.
/!\ WARNING FOR BLENDER USERS/!\
As of
Blender 2.63.0 (Official stable release available on the Blender site) the core mechanics of Blender have been greatly improved. Blender now supports single faces that have more than 4 or 3 edges/vertices called "n-gons". So for example an octagon with 8 vertices and 8 edges could be a single face. Before you would have needed to construct this octagon from 8 or 6 triangles or 3 quads.
From left to right: A triangle "tri", a square "quad", an octagon "8-gon" (single face!), and an octagon constructed of 3 quads.
Obviously these n-gons are not supported in Blockland but
they are not supported in any older versions of Blender either. This new feature is called BMesh and it completely reworked the entire polygon modeling aspect of Blender. This it also affects the saves.
Any save made OR edited with Blender 2.63.0 will not work properly in any older versions of Blender. If you open a save made in Blender 2.63.0 in an older Blender version, your models will be missing all faces. It does not matter if your models only had triangles and quads and no n-gons. The code rewrite affects the entire modeling system.
But fear not! There is a way to fix this, but it comes with a price. When you open a .blend file edited in Blender 2.63.0 in an older Blender version do the following:
- Select an object missing faces.
- Go to Edit Mode.
- Select all vertices by pressing A.
- Press F to recreate all faces.
I've tested this method with several different models and it appears to work perfectly. But with one exception:
All faces become smooth shaded. If your model has a lot of parts that are smooth shaded and some parts flat shaded I suggest you separate those parts into objects before opening the save in an older Blender version.
The latest Blender version that does not have BMesh in Blender 2.62.0 available for download on the official site here:
http://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.62/BMesh was introduced in Blender 2.63.0 available here:
http://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.63/
