Blender For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Simplifying Your Life As a Modeler with Modifiers

Working with meshes can get complicated when you have complex models consisting of lots and lots of vertices. Keeping track of these vertices and making changes to your model can quickly become a daunting and tedious task, even with the ability to use loops and rings. You can quickly run into problems if you have a symmetrical model where the left side is supposed to be identical to the right, or if you need more vertices to make your model appear smoother. In these times, you really want the computer to take on some of this tedious additional work so that you can focus on the creative parts.

Fortunately, Blender actually has a feature, called modifiers, that helps tackle the monotony. Despite their rather generic-sounding name, modifiers are an extremely powerful way to save you time and frustration by letting the computer assume the responsibility for grunt work, such as adding smoothing vertices or making your model symmetric. Another benefit of modifiers is that they're nondestructive, meaning that you can freely add and remove modifiers to and from your object. As long as you don't apply the modifier, it won't actually make any permanent changes to the object itself. You can always return to the original, unmodified mesh.

You can access modifiers for your mesh in the Modifiers section of the Properties editor. Left-click the Add Modifier button to see a list of the modifiers that are available. Figure 5-5 shows the Modifiers ...