Learning Blender: A Hands-On Guide to Creating 3D Animated Characters

Interaction Modes

Blender provides different ways to modify objects in your scene (such as modeling, texturing, sculpting, and posing) and they’re called Interaction Modes. By default, you work in Object Mode and are able to move, rotate, and scale; basically, Object Mode allows you to place objects in a scene. But there are other modes. Probably one of the most useful ones is Edit Mode, which is used to edit the ObData. For example, you would use Edit Mode to model a mesh, access its vertices, edges, and faces, and change its shape.

You can find the Interaction Mode menu on the 3D View header (see Figure 3.4); the options it displays depend on the type of object you have selected. For now, you’ll just focus on the Object and Edit modes. You’ll ...