Blocking In - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 46

Figure 4-27: With the object's coordinate axes turned on, it becomes obvious why the Mirror modifier isn't producing the desired
effects. Applying the transforms on the mesh before applying modifiers produces more predictable results.

* Of course, instead of the above, you can manipulate

Shading Modes
Notice that so far in blocking out the projects, I
have kept the meshes we have been creating shaded
flat—that is, the faces appear faceted and do not
blend into one another. The reason for this is that it
makes it easier to read at a glance the direction that
the faces of a mesh are pointing and to see how the
forms of the mesh are progressing. Later on, I will
use smooth shading to render some of the models in
order to make them look smooth (Figure 4-29), but
for now this isn't necessary. To switch between the
two, simply select your mesh, and in the Tool Shelf,
use the Flat and Smooth operators to switch the
shading of your selection between flat and smooth
shading. You can do this either in Object mode,
which affects the whole of each selected object, or
Edit mode, which affects only the selected faces.

an object's local coordinates to your advantage. For
example, you could use a Mirror modifier to create a
symmetrical object and then move and rotate it to a
position in your scene that doesn't match the global
coordinates. As long as you don't apply these trans-
forms in Object mode at this point, the results of the
modifier should stay the way you want them to.

Finally, as with the body, I added a Mirror
modifier and then used proportional editing to
better align the wings with the back and tweak
the shape.
At this point, I had completed blocking in the
bat's body, as shown in Figure 4-28. We'll create its
final topology once the sculpting is finished, as dis-
cussed in Chapters 5 and 7.

Figure 4-28: The finished body base mesh