Blender For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Adding to a Scene

There's got to be more to life than that plain default cube, right? Indeed, there is. Blender offers a whole slew of primitives, or basic objects, to build from.

Anytime you add a new object in Blender, the origin of that object is located wherever you placed the 3D cursor.

You may notice that for pop-up menus like the Dynamic Spacebar Menu (see sidebar), Blender places the last menu option you choose directly under your mouse cursor. This workflow feature helps increase your speed. The idea is that you often want to do the same task multiple times in a row. Blender makes repetitive tasks easier by shortening the distance you have to move your mouse with each function.

Adding objects

To add a new object to your scene, use the Shift+A hotkey and choose the type of primitive you want to put into the scene. You have the following choices:

• Mesh: Meshes are polygon-based objects made up of vertices, edges, and faces. They're the most common type of modeling object used in Blender.
• Curve: Curves are objects made up of curved or straight lines that you manipulate with a set of control points. Control points are similar to vertices, but you can edit them in a couple of ways that vertices can't. Blender has two basic forms of curves, Bézier curves and NURBS (Non-Uniform ...