Now that you’re a little bit more familiar with the Interface and Navigation, it’s time to get our hands on Blender and start manipulating objects within the 3D viewport. In this article you’ll learn how to rotate, locate, and scale objects in Blender.
Standing alone, in front of you, is a default cube. This cube is also known as a Mesh Object. A mesh object is basically any 3D object rendered by the computer using Vertices (points in space) to draw Edges (lines between points in space), which also have Faces drawn between them.
We’ll cover vertices, edges, and faces more in depth when we reach Mesh Editing... Mesh can also be referred to as Geometry, so keep that in mind to avoid any confusion.
We’re going to start by transforming the cube. Transforming, in a 3D context, means working with either the Location, Rotation, and Scale of an object in the 3D space.
If you want to move this mesh around, just select the cube by clicking on it. You’ll see it is selected because it shows a green highlight around it. Press G (as in “grab”), and then move the mouse around.
You’ll see how the cube moves along with your mouse. To drop the cube in a new location, simply click again when it is in a position that you want. To drop the selection, and cancel the operation, while you’re moving it after pressing G, just right click and the object will snap back to its original position.
To rotate an object, select it by clicking, then press R (as in “rotate”), and move the mouse to manipulate it. Click once again to confirm the rotation.
To scale an object, simply select by clicking, then press S (as in “scale”), and move the cursor away from the object to scale up, or move it towards the object to scale down. Once again, just click to confirm the new scale.
Tip: Changing the scale of an object will alter its dimensions. As you can see with the cube, it comes with a 1.0 scale by default and a dimension of 2m3. If we change to a 2.0 scale, its dimensions will change to 4m3, and if we change it to 0.5, its dimensions will be 1m3.
