Modeling: A Million to One - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 85

Beside the pivot style menu on the 3D
view header is a button called Manipu-
late Object Centers Only. This magical
button causes transformations to only
affect object centers, not their compo-
nent structures. The effect works both in
Object mode and Edit mode. In this
case, selecting the four faces on the
bottoms of the legs and enabling Manip-
ulate Object Centers Only will move the
faces away from one another when
scaling without actually changing their
size. This is exactly what we want.

Make sure to also enable Proportional
Editing Falloff (O key), or only the
selected faces will move. With PEF
turned on, it will pull the rest of the leg
along with it. Do this now to move the
bottoms of the legs away from the center.

Figure 4.27 A cut and sharpened leg.

With the bottoms of the legs splayed a bit,
let's reduce the size of those bottom faces (and everything else attached to them with PEF) so that the legs
appear to taper as well. Turn off Manipulate Object Centers Only—this time we actually want to scale the
structure itself, not just move it around. Change the pivot style to Individual Origins; this setting will scale
(or rotate) the selected element as though it were the only one in the selection. In this example, it means
that each of the four bottom faces will shrink in place, without the normal kind of contracting motion that
a midpoint style pivot would bring.

Figure 4.28 shows the result of these last few scaling procedures.

The last thing to add is a back. You should know what to do now:

● Select and extrude upward two of the little “launch-pad” quadrangles we created earlier.
● Give each extruded piece of the backframe two loop cuts and slide them toward the tops and bottoms.

We now have two pieces of backframe sticking up, but nothing to join them. Add a double loop cut that
runs along the inside and outside edges of these upper pieces. It will also run around the bottom of the
chair and two of the legs. Then, make a single loop cut a little over halfway up on each of the risers. The
result is shown in Figure 4.29 . Select the upper interior face that is highlighted in the figure on each riser,
then press Ctrl-Alt-F to execute the Bridge Faces command (also available from the Mesh > Faces menu).
Blender builds geometry that connects the two faces, leaving them intact and selected. Use the X key to
remove them, choosing Only Faces from the Delete menu when it pops up. Two loop cuts on this chair
back, slid to the sides, finishes the basic form.