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

Managing Datablocks

Datablocks are the most basic Blender components. Every element you can build, such as objects, meshes, lamps, textures, materials, and armatures (skeletons), is made out of datablocks. Everything in the 3D scene is contained in an object.

Whether you’re creating a mesh, a lamp, or a curve, you’re creating an object. In Blender, any object has object data (ObData) inside it, so the object itself acts as a kind of container for the data. The ObData defines the type of element an object contains. As an example, let’s look at a mesh and see the difference between the object and the object data in Figure 3.3.

Figure 3.3 Properties ...