# Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Making Your Creation Smoother

## Getting started

To begin, open a new scene in Blender. Let\'s clean up the scene a
little by selecting the lamp and camera in the scene, press M to move
them to a different layer and click on the fifth layer from the left to
place the objects. Go back to layer 1 and delete anything else. You may
also want to get rid of the grid by opening the View Properties and
turning off the Grid Floor and X & Y axes.

To block out our character, we\'re going to use an object type that is
probably the least used and useful of any known to mankind. Let\'s hear
it for\... Metaballs!

## Sculpting With \"Lumps of Clay\"

right\|200px Go into the
top view (important), press Space and add a **metaball.** Metaballs are
a nifty, ancient piece of 3D technology that is useful for creating
blobs. (Similar to lumps of clay, eh?) You create simple primitive
shapes and scale and rotate them to block out your character\'s shape.
When the primitives come close to one another, they \"bleed into one
another\" in much the same way that water droplets merge when they
touch. Cool.

If you\'re using an earlier version of Blender that jumps out of Object
mode into Edit mode when you create an object, then press Tab to switch
back to Object mode, as you won\'t be able to scale your Meta primitive
non-proportionally in Edit mode.

In Object mode, you can change these options for the entire Meta object,
while tabbing into Edit mode gives you more options for the selected
meta primitive, such as changing the type from Ball to Tube, Plane,
Cube, ;;etc.; (You can also make \"Negative metaballs.\")

right\|150px Press
**Shift+D** to duplicate the Metaball, and place it where you like.
Continue blocking out your character, building enough blobs to represent
the limbs or forms you will need to sculpt your masterpiece.

The balls at the end of the limbs, were scaled **SKEY** larger, and then
moved **GKEY** out a bit more.

Don\'t get carried away and put in too much detail at this stage: use as
*few* shapes as you need. (This is supposed to be quick and fun, after
all\...)

## Meta-mess!

You should still be in object mode.

Now that you\'ve got something that resembles what you\'re after, select
all the Metaballs and ( be in object mode) type **ALT+C** -\> \"delete
original\", to convert it to polygons so you can actually do something
with your blob.

**Noob note:** if you pick \"keep original\" you will still have the
meta balls present, plus have a mesh version of the metaballs sharing
exactly the same space. When you select \"delete original\", the meta
balls are turned into the mesh, and the circles that the metaballs were
originally in hang around, but are empty.

right\|200px

Still in object mode!

Delete any of those black rings left over from the metas and select your
new polygon mesh.

If you Tab into Edit mode you will see terrifying ugliness instead of
nicely gridded mesh. \"Surely we can\'t be expected to create anything
useful out of this!\" you shriek. Take it easy, my friend. It\'s time to
add a *Decimate* modifier (make sure you\'re in object mode when doing
this to see changes).

Switch back to object mode!

The **Decimate** modifier (you will only see things change if you\'re in
object mode) will do two things for us. Its primary job is to *reduce*
the poly count of a mesh. A pleasant side-effect for our purposes is
that it will begin to *rearrange* the topology into a more manageable
heap of triangles and quads. Keep reducing the Ratio slider below 0.5
until it becomes as coarse as you can stand. You want the lowest polygon
base you can have that still maintains enough detail in the limbs and
shapes you made with the Metaball phase.

One thing to watch for is that this process sometimes creates holes as
it does its best to simplify the mesh. I find that usually you can
slightly change the Ratio to fix the problem, but if you\'re still
finding holes, check out the \"Tips & Tricks\" section at the end.

As you can see, this step greatly reduces the Face Count, which will be
good later. Next we need to get rid of as many of those triangles as
possible. Click Apply (in the modifier panel)

Switch to Edit mode!

Press A until all of the vertices are selected (turn yellow) and hit
Alt-J to convert the faces from triangles to quads, which will subdivide
better. Now you should have something you can work with.

## Beginning to sculpt

Right next to the Modifiers panel is the **Multires** panel. (Note: In
recent versions of Blender this is not its own panel\-\--it is a
Modifier.) A multires object has the options to add numerous levels of
smooth subdivision to a mesh. While you can use the sculpt tools on any
polygon or nurbs mesh, the great strength of sculpting with Multires is
the ability to jump back and forth to different levels, quickly
sketching out the gross form at lower levels, and adding finer detail at
the higher levels. Add the Multires and Add a level; we\'re ready to
sculpt!

:   **Noob note:** If nothing seems to be happening while you\'re trying
    to sculpt your mesh, it\'s because you haven\'t applied your
    Decimate. it must be locked down and applied before you\'re actually
    allowed to do anything to your mesh.

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:   **Noob note:** Only apply multires once, doing it a few times will
    quickly increase the polygon count to amounts that will really slow
    blender down

In case you haven\'t noticed, Blender\'s different modes offer different
tool sets and options. To make the sculpting tools available you need to
be in **Sculpt** mode, accessible through the Mode drop-down in any 3D
window header. You\'ll see two new tabs next to the multires panel,
*Sculpt* and *Brush.* Sculpt has most of the options you\'ll need to
begin shaping your mesh. Note that most of the different brushes in this
panel have hot-keys which will save a lot of time(**G**=Grab,
**D**=Draw, **S**=Smooth, *etc.*). Most important here is changing the
brush size and intensity. Pressing F and dragging the mouse will resize
the brush, while Shift-F will allow you to adjust the Brush Intensity.
You can also turn on **Symmetry** to paint, for instance, both sides of
a face at one time. This can speed up tasks tremendously, as long as
your mesh is aligned to the axis properly.

