Blender For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Making Changes by Using Edit Mode

Moving primitive objects around is fun and all, but you're interested in getting in there and completely changing these objects to match your vision. You want to do 3D modeling. Well, you're in the right place. This section introduces you to Edit mode, a concept that's deeply embedded throughout Blender for editing objects. Even though this section is focused mostly on polygon modeling, also called mesh editing, most of the same principles apply for editing curves, surfaces, armatures, and even text.

When you understand how Blender thinks, figuring out unknown parts of the program is much easier.

Distinguishing between Object mode and Edit mode

In Chapter 3, you do everything in Object mode. As its name indicates, Object mode is where you work with whole objects. However, Object mode isn't very useful for actually changing the internal structure of your object. For example, select (right-click) the cube in the default scene. You know that you can turn it into a more rectangular shape by scaling it along one of the axes. But what if you want to turn the cube into a pyramid? You need to modify the actual components that make up the cube. These changes are made by entering Edit mode.

You can get to Edit mode in one of two ways: with the mouse or with a hotkey. To use the mouse method, left-click the Object Mode button in the 3D View's header. From ...