When you archive all Blender Basic Commands now it’s time to study about modeling tools.
For Second Life user, I have discover there’re 2 Blender tools could rapidly make the modeling process grow really fast. One of them is call Proportional Edit which describe in this tutorial and another tools is Sculpt Mode.
Proportional Edit work the same way like magnet does. It can manipulate many vertices at a time make your sculpt prim surface transform smoothly in one single click.
Screenshot in this tutorial are using Blender 2.49
1. Proportional Editing only avaliable in Edit Mode you must click on the mode switcher under 3D scene and change it to Edit Mode.
2. Click on the Donut Icon in the same bar and select “on” to activate Proportional Editing tool or you could press key “O” on your keyboard for shortcut.Proportional Editing has 2 main options as you can see on the right screenshot.
On: The magnetic effect will depend only on radius of your cursor’s size.
Connected: The magnetic effect calculate by include how far your geometry connected.
3. Right click on any vertex to select it then press key “G” to start moving vertex.In the screenshort I select the vertex on the top of sculpt prim’s sphere and then move mouse up & down …now you can feel the effect!
With Propertional Edit activate your selected vertex become magnet tools that move other vetices around them together.
You can increase and decrease Effect’s Radius by using your Wheel Mouse or press PageUp and PageDown button on keyboard.
4. The most convenience thing is you can set 7 type of Proportional Edit effect by click on Falloff Option which showing next to donut icon.Each Falloff effect will transform your mesh surface differently.
See some Falloff effect from below screenshot but I suggest you try all of them to get the feeling and understand how it work.
Now you understand that with Proportional Edit enable you could modeling any organic shape like animal or muscle of human body more easily. Remember Proportional tool also work with other manipulator like Move/Rotate/Scale command too.
