Mirror modeling is easy in trueSpace, and helps in producing great symmetrical spaceships for role-playing game illustrations, but it’s not so easy in Blender.
A common technique is to model one half of an object and use Alt D to create a linked duplicate which can then be mirrored on one axis to produce a perfect mirror-image copy, which updates in realtime as you edit.
Doc:Manual/Modifiers/Mesh/Mirror – BlenderWiki
I thought this was a great tip and it took me a while to find it, but there was just one problem. It mirrors great as I add to the front and rear of my 3D spaceship model, but when I select something on the side to mirror it selects the same side of the other half of the model (this means it ends up selecting a face inside the model), it should of course chose the opposite side, OK so I had an idea of my own.
I tried flipping the other half of the model around and then it began to mirror the 3D mesh well at the sides, cool I solved it… or did I. When I tried modeling the front and back of my spaceship they had gone out of sync.
Mirror model is one of the most useful features I found in trueSpace, and I was thinking, if I can not get the same useful feature to work in Blender, I could be forced to go back to creating my 3D meshes for science fiction role-playing game illustrations in trueSpace.
But then I found this video tutorial on mirror modeling in Blender. I’m not usually a big fan of video tutorials, but it turned out to be the only place I could find the information. Even the encyclopedic wiki books I’d found kept saying “now do the same thing to the other side of the model”. Things quickly become unsymmetrical no matter how hard you try, you just got to have mirror model.
