How to: Blender tutorial 2 - Creating Objects and Blender Modes

3D animation may seem to be the realm of big budget movies, and certainly major companies like Industrial Light and Magic use big budget software. Thankfully, the if you want to try 3d animation as a hobby, you can do an impressive amount of work using free software such as Blender. Alot of the principles are transferable across animation software in general. This tutorial follows on from my previous Blender tutorial. This discusses how you go about navigating the screen and loading files - so it's best to take a look at that first before you come back here :)

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How to: Blender tutorial 1 - Moving, Saving and Customising your Screen

How to: Blender tutorial 2 - Creating Objects and Blender Modes

How to: Blender tutorial 3 - Editing objects and Vertices (part 1)

How to: Blender tutorial 4 - Editing objects and Vertices (part 2)

How to: Blender tutorial 5 - Materials and Textures

How to: Blender tutorial 6 - Lighting and Cameras

How to: Blender tutorial 7 - The World Settings

How to: Blender tutorial 8 - The Rendering Settings

How to: Blender tutorial 9 - The brilliance of raytracing

How to: Blender tutorial 10 - Animation

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1 -- The basics of creating objects

You can see here the “3D cursor” which determines the location of the next object you create. I want it to appear directly above the cube - to make sure I need to check both of the perspective screens….

It’s in the centre in the top screen…

And above the cube in the side view…

Great!

When ever you create an object you must never forget you are working in a 3D SPACE. That is why there are 4 perspective screens for you to work with. Just because it looks right on one doesn’t mean it will be right on the others.... Use them all! (Or you will probably not get the results you want).

Right, now that we know where we want our object to appear within our 3D space now we can create it.

Spacebar brings up the insert menu…. Then you go to add… in this case we want to insert a mesh, and then insert a UV sphere. (See below).

You will then get an info box questioning you on the number of segments and lines you want. This is important for editing and the smoothness of your object (the more the smoother generally – but also the more lines/segments the more memory it takes up and the longer it takes to render). Don’t worry too much at this point though :).

Ok, as you can see the sphere has been created above the cube and in the centre:

It is automatically in “edit mode”.

2 -- The two modes

There are two modes in Blender

OBJECT MODE allows you to affect (only) the whole object

EDIT MODE allows you to edit an object

You can change between these two modes in two ways:

one - Go to the Mode button which is at the bottom of each window and press the left mouse button which will bring up the mode menu and let you choose which mode you want to be in. This changes the mode in EVERY window.

two - You can also change the mode by pressing the Tab key which toggles between the two.

You can tell which mode you’re in by the image you see on the screen:

OBJECT MODE

You can see your object as a pink wire frame model. (Note the places where the ‘wires’ cross.. they will become significant in edit mode)

EDIT MODE

Your objects is seen in yellow.. if you look closely you will see that at each intersection of the lines you saw in the wire frame model there is a point – these points are called vertices. This is what we will manipulate when changing the object.

The object is yellow because all the vertices are selected. Pressing A will unselect them. If you right-click on a point it will turn pink. This means it’s selected and that you can move it around if you want too