Blender For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 5

Creating Anything You Can Imagine with Meshes

In This Chapter

• Working with vertices
• Using modifiers such as Mirror, Subdivision Surface, and Array
• Sculpting meshes to have extremely high detail
• Completing a practical example of modeling an eye for your characters

Polygon-based meshes are at the core of nearly every computer-generated 3D animation from video games and architectural visualization to television commercials and feature-length films. Computers typically handle meshes more quickly than other types of 3D objects like NURBS or meta balls, and meshes are generally a lot easier to control. In fact, when it comes down to it, even NURBS and meta balls 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 this chapter exposes you to a bunch of handy Blender features that help you work with complex meshes without drowning in a crazy vertex soup.