There are three basic operations that you’ll use thousands of times when learning Blender, and these are duplicating, renaming, and deleting objects.
You can duplicate any object you added to the Viewport by simply selecting it, then pressing SHIFT + D, next moving the cursor out, and finally clicking to confirm the position.
You can also duplicate along a single axis using the same principle of moving along the axis that we explained when talking about Transforms. To do this, just select an object, hold SHIFT and hit D to duplicate it, and then press Y to move it only on the Y axis. Just click to confirm, and that’s it!
Now that you start having multiple objects in the Scene, you may want a way to keep track of them. You can do this by renaming them. You can see the name of every object in the Outliner, and you’ll notice that, when you start duplicating, Blender adds suffixes such as “.001”, “.002”, “003”, and so on, for every object that was duplicated. This is because no two objects can have the exact same name in Blender.
However, if you want to change these names to something different than the default, you can do so by either double-clicking the name on the Outliner, typing the name, and then pressing Enter to confirm it, or by clicking the object on the 3D Viewport and pressing F2, typing the name, and pressing Enter to confirm and see the new name in the Outliner.
To delete an object, just select it by clicking it and either hit Delete on your keyboard, or X, which will bring up a confirm menu to delete the selected object. Know that pressing the Backspace key doesn’t work for deleting an object.
These 3 basic operations are crucial to keep your Outliner organized, and it will greatly optimize your workflow!
