Blender 2.49 and intersecting objects

Blender is a great tool for the price (free), but it is certainly very difficult to use, especially in an engineering context. So here are a few scripts and techniques to make life a little easier.

First, boolean operations are useful in a number of situations, such as welding or splitting faces based on intersecting objects. An example:

• Create two planes (create plane, create another plane and rotate/translate it so they intersect (g-grab to translate, r-to rotate))
  
• Select both objects (note: if you want to split a single mesh, switch to edit mode, select one set of the faces you want to intersect, and split the mesh ('p' to separate), then later you can re-join objects into a single mesh with 'ctrl j')
  
• Select the boolean operations (press w) and choose 'intersect' this will create a third object.
  

You may want this intersection point in the original two planes. If so, select the intersection and duplicate it (shift-d) chose the intersection, and join it to one of the planes, then choose the duplicate intersection and join it to the other plane. If you want one object with both these planes as one mesh, then just join (ctrl j) all objects. Edit the mesh, and create new faces (use f) by selecting the appropriate vertices.

And thats it. (Note: I triangulated my mesh.)

Now for some scripts:

• In Blender 2.4x, it is difficult to specify an object location, or to move a group of objects (without parenting/un-parenting them all the time, or suffering 'multi-user' problems). I created a Blender script to translate and resize a group of objects mesh data that speeds up the process.
  
• Understanding what is happening with your data can be troublesome, so here is a small script that prints the location data for a selected vertex.