Blender For Dummies®

Chapter 5. Creating Anything You Can Imagine with Meshes

In This Chapter

• Working with vertices

• Using modifiers such as Mirror, Subsurf, and Array

• Sculpting meshes to have extremely high detail

Polygon-based meshes are at the core of nearly every computer-generated 3D animation from video games to television commercials to feature-length films. Computers typically handle meshes more quickly than other types of 3D objects like NURBS or metaballs, and meshes are generally a lot easier to control. In fact, when it comes down to it, even NURBS and metaballs are converted to a mesh of triangles — a process called tesselation — when the computer hardware processes them.

For these reasons, meshes are the primary foundation for most of Blender's functionality. Whether you're building a small scene, creating a character for animation, or simulating water pouring into a sink, you'll ultimately be working with meshes. Working with meshes can get a bit daunting if you're not careful, because you have to control each vertex that makes up your mesh. The more complex the mesh, the more vertices you have to keep track of. Chapter 4 gives you a lot of the basics for working with meshes in Edit mode, but in this chapter, you are exposed to a bunch of the handy features Blender has that help you work with complex meshes without drowning in crazy vertex soup.

Tip

When working with meshes or any other type of 3D object in Blender, it's often helpful to work from reference images. If you have a separate monitor, ...