Modeling: A Million to One - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 71

Shift-O. This shortcut cycles through the different falloff modes: Smooth, Sphere, Root, Sharp, Linear,
and Constant. You don't need to memorize these, and in fact I often don't pay attention to which is
which. I just cycle through them until I get the falloff shape I need. The shape in Figure 4.12 can be
achieved by setting the PEF circle to reach just to the bottom of the petal, using the Sharp falloff style.
See if you can adjust your controls to get the same effect.
Web
You can see images of each of the different PEF falloff modes in the Web Bucket for this chapter
at http://www.blenderfoundations.com .
PEF works not only with a single element selected, but you can have an entire line of vertices selected,
or some vertices and edges. You can use it with rotation, scaling, and even some of the more advanced
transform modes like Shrink/Fatten that we haven't learned yet.
To finish the petal and give a little more dimension, let's select the column of vertices down the center
and offset them slightly in side view. You'll probably have better luck selecting them in the front view.
You won't need to move it much, but the result should look like Figure 4.12(b) . When you have it,
either use the view menu or Ctrl-Alt-Q to toggle back out of Quad view.
Okay. The petal's done, and it felt like a lot of work. Don't worry though—we're learning concepts as
we do the grunt work. Once the basics are down, this will get a lot faster.
Move back to a top view of the petal (Numpad-7) if you're not already there. Recall from Chapter 3 how
the 3D cursor can be used as a visual reference of a pivot point for transformations? Let's use it to help
efficiently duplicate our petal around a central point. Using the LMB, click just slightly below the bottom
of the petal. Position your view (zoom and pan) so that the 3D cursor appears in about the middle of the
3D view, with the petal taking up the upper portion. You're going to create a number of duplicates of the
petal, rotating each around the 3D cursor. Before you begin though, use the O key to disable PEF mode.
Leaving it on while trying to move a duplicate item will result in pulling the original right along with it.
Use the A key to select all of the vertices in the petal. As a default, Blender rotates items around their
center point. However, we want to rotate around the 3D cursor. If you remember from Chapter 3, the
pivot point can be changed either on the 3D view header (the Rotation/Scaling Pivot icon menu) or by
pressing the keyboard period key. When free modeling, you will probably change between 3D cursor pivot
(period key) and center point pivot (comma key) with some frequency, so this is another shortcut that's
great to commit to reflex. No matter how you decide to do it, set the pivot point to be the 3D cursor.
The Duplicate Object command from Chapter 3 was Shift-D. It's the same here. Press Shift-D to duplicate
the selected mesh of the petal, then press the R key. Once again, this changes the Transform mode on-
the-fly from translation to rotation. As you move the mouse, you'll see that the newly created petal is
rotating around the 3D cursor. When you have it rotated to your liking, LMB click to drop it in place.
Do this several more times until you have a nice flowery cluster. My result, which you don't have to
replicate exactly, is seen in Figure 4.13 .
Let's add a simple center to the flower. Ideally, we'd like a squashed dome. One of the things to consider
when modeling is: What can save me time and effort? In this case, that timesaver is going to be the UV Sphere