Blocking In - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 29

4
blocking in

With preparation finished and concept art and ref-
erence at the ready, we can move on to modeling.
Modeling is the process of creating a 3D object that
is made up of individual points connected to form
faces, which in turn make up more complex shapes.
There are many ways to create models in Blender,
from modifying primitives, like a simple cube or
sphere, to building the surface of a mesh face by
face or drawing smooth curves that Blender can
convert into objects composed of vertices and faces.
Modeling can be a long process, and to save
time, it helps to know where you are going with
a particular modeling task. Still, you can't model
an object all at once; you have to start somewhere,
and that's where blocking in comes in. Blocking in
is the process of adding simple placeholders for
the objects you want to create so that you can bet-
ter plan how they fit together, consider their indi-
vidual constructions, and spot problems before
they become major issues. Once a scene has been
blocked in, you can move on to refining, replacing,
or adding to each part to create a final model. For
example, in the Jungle Temple scene, simple ele-
ments like cubes are used as placeholders for key

elements; for other projects, we create simple base
meshes for sculpting that act as a foundation for
developing the final form of our sculpted models.

Basic Modeling Terms

Before we dive in, here are some definitions of
Blender's basic modeling concepts that I'll use
throughout this chapter. Table 4-1 lists them in
hierarchical order: Vertices make up edges, which
make up faces, and so on.

Edit Mode

Edit mode (shown in Figure 4-1) is where the mod-
eling magic happens. With a mesh object selected,
you can enter Edit mode by pressing tab or by click-
ing the mode drop-down menu in the 3D Viewport
header and selecting Edit mode. Once in Edit
mode, your selected object is editable (if it is in fact
editable—empty objects and lamps, for example,
are not). When an object is editable, you can select
and manipulate parts as well as create new parts.