Blocking In - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 37

Next, I added a cube, changed to Edit mode
( tab ), and scaled it to the rough proportions of the
torso. I did this first in overall terms by just scaling
it to the right width ( S ). Then I scaled up the z -axis
( S 4 Z ) before scaling in on the y -axis ( S 4 Y ) to
make it taller and shallower. By adding horizontal
loop cuts (extra rings of edges around the mesh,
as discussed below) around the middle of the cube
( ctrl -R) and moving them forward a little, I added
a bit of curvature to the torso and began refining
its shape.
At this point, it was easier to start using a
Mirror modifier to keep my mesh symmetrical
because the model was becoming more complex.
To do so, I added a loop cut vertically around the
middle of the torso and deleted its right-hand side.
Adding a Mirror modifier then mirrored the geom-
etry of the left-hand side of the body to create a
symmetrical whole that only required editing on
one side (see Figure 4-12). At the same time, turn-
ing on clipping keeps vertices on the midline from
straying away from the object's x origin, which
prevents holes from appearing in the mesh if you
accidentally move a vertex slightly away from the
line of symmetry.

For example, in Figure 4-13, adding two edge loops
around the face loop encircling the cylinder cre-
ates a new face loop running around the middle.
Technically, an edge/face loop should be one con-
tinuous cyclical path, but the term is often used to
mean any reasonably long chain of quads/edges.
The Loop Cut tool ( ctrl -R) is extremely impor-
tant because it follows a path of quads through your
mesh, cutting through each one to create new edges
that flow through the face loop. If you activate the
Loop Cut tool and mouse over an edge, Blender will
highlight the path in purple. If the path reaches a
triangle or an open edge of the mesh, it stops.
Loop cuts are useful because they allow you
to add definition to your model while maintaining
clean topology. You can create multiple loop cuts
by scrolling your mouse wheel after pressing ctrl -R
and before choosing an edge to start cutting from
(see Figure 4-13).
Blender has other operators for interacting
with edge loops and face loops, including ones for
deleting the loop ( joining the faces on either side
together to keep the mesh whole) and sliding the
loop up and down the edges parallel to it. You can
also select an entire edge loop at once to manipulate
it. (If it isn't cyclic, Blender will simply find the lon-
gest path that it can.) These operators are detailed
in Table 4-4.
As the next step in my project, I extruded
down from the hips to make the leg and added
loop cuts to flesh out its shape, as shown in

Loop Cuts and Face and Edge Loops
A face loop is a string of quads connected end-to-end
in a continuous path, allowing an edge loop (a chain
of connected vertices) to be cut through the middle.

Figure 4-12: Adding a Mirror modifier to the body requires adding an edge loop around the middle and deleting half of
the torso first. By default, the mirror modifier mirrors objects around the x -axis, but you can change this to mirror around
any combination of the x -, y -, and z -axes, depending on your model.