Blender For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 4

Working in Edit Mode and Object Mode

In This Chapter

• Making changes to your 3D objects
• Adding new objects to a scene
• Saving, opening, and appending .blend files

When working on a scene in Blender, your life revolves around repeatedly selecting objects, transforming them, editing them, and relating them to one another. You regularly shift from dealing with your model in Object mode to doing refinements in Edit mode.

And this process isn't only for modeling, but also for most of the other heavy tasks performed in Blender. Therefore, you can reuse the skills you pick up in this chapter in parts of Blender that have nothing to do with 3D modeling, such as animating, rigging, compositing, and motion tracking. Just as many of the transform operations work in editors other than the 3D View, many of the concepts here transfer nicely to other parts of Blender. Even if you don't know how to do something, chances are good that if you think like Blender thinks, you'll be able to make a successful guess.

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 the primitive objects that ship with Blender (described in detail in this chapter) 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 ...