Modeling: A Million to One - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 72

primitive. As noted in Chapter 3 there are
a number of primitives to choose from,
and the more you are familiar with them,
the better you will be able to take advan-
tage of them while modeling. Coinciden-
tally, slicing the rear half off a UV Sphere
primitive will give us a very squashable
dome. The Web Bucket for Chapter 4
contains images of each of the different
mesh primitives.

Use the Shift-A menu to add a Mesh >
UV Sphere to the scene. Adding objects
with the Shift-A menu in Chapter 3
created independent elements that were
individually animatable. When adding
mesh primitives while already in Edit
mode on a mesh, though, their structure
is added directly into the existing mesh
framework. It's all part of the same object.

What we would like to do now is to
select the vertices that make up the lower
half of the UV Sphere. This presents a
problem, though, as the sphere seems to be intersecting the flower petals. A little while ago, you pressed
the C key to access the selection brush. You could do that again, but there's an even easier way this time.
When making fairly boxy regional selections, you can press the B key to enter Border Select mode. Border
Select mode turns the cursor into a crosshairs that spans the entire 3D view. LMB click and drag to define
a region. When you let go, mesh elements within that region are selected.

Figure 4.13 Several petals, duplicated from the irst and rotated around the
3D cursor, which is found in the center.

If you were to try to make this selection from the top view, you'd be in trouble. The 3D cursor is in the
middle of the lower, so that's where the UV Sphere came into being. Trying to select its lower half would
result in also selecting some of the vertices of the petals. One of the big challenges in modeling is in the
management of selections, and sometimes in just being able to select one element without accidentally
grabbing another along with it. There are a couple of ways to get around this.

First, you could just switch into side view and see if you have a clear shot at it. Depending on where the
3D cursor was, you may or may not be able to B-key border select the lower half of the sphere this way.

Second, you could Undo (or just delete the selected UV Sphere), reposition the 3D cursor away from the
existing portion of the model, and re-add the sphere.

Third, you could move the existing sphere clear of the rest of the model. If you've tried to select it already
and messed up the selection state, there is a simple way to select the entire UV Sphere at once. The
L key selects mesh islands. An island is a distinct, separate part of a mesh. Try it now by clearing any