Transforming a cube alone can’t really get us far. If you’re learning Blender, you need to know how to add more objects into the scene, so here’s how to add Mesh primitives in Blender. To do this, just hold SHIFT + A to bring up the Add menu. You’ll see a whole list of different objects that you can add to your scene. For now, let’s just focus on the first type, which is Mesh.
You can see the list of Mesh Primitives that you can add to your Viewport. Remember that each scene begins with a default cube? Well, they’re called “Primitives” because they have a basic shape such as cubes, spheres, cones, cylinders, and are used as the starting points for modeling more complex shapes.
Tip: The Add menu can also be accessed by going to the top toolbar of the 3D Viewport and looking for the Add tab.
When you add a new mesh into the scene, you will see another Add menu down at the bottom left corner. If you click to expand it, you’ll have some initialization options for the Primitive you just added.
So, let’s say we add a cylinder and then click on this Add menu: We will be able to choose how many sides it has that make up the circle around the top, right in the Vertices section. If we set this value into 6, for example, it will turn it into a hexagon with 6 sides.
If we try it with a sphere, just to make another example, we will be able to choose how many Segments and Rings our object will have with their respective sliders. This is really useful to control the resolution, or also to get some interesting shapes just by changing values alone
We recommend you to play around with these Initialization Settings, so you can get familiar.
Important: Keep in mind that as soon as you click anywhere off or perform any other operation in Blender, this Initialization Settings menu will be gone. The only way to get it back is by deleting the object and re-adding it once again.
Now, before we continue, you may notice that, when you add an object, it pops right at the center of the world. In Blender, things tend to appear by default right where that little 3D cursor is at (we are talking about the one with a red and white dotted circle).
It will always be located by default at the center of the world, but you can change this by simply holding SHIFT and right-clicking where you want to relocate it. This way any object you add won’t pop up right at the center. If you ever want to change it back to its original location, just hit SHIFT + C and it will be back right at the center of the scene (this will also reset the camera zoom).
Now you’re ready to add new Primitives into your scene!
