so now let's understand the correlations of everything we've just learned what's up i'm
jonathan and welcome to maker tales where i'm sharing my maker journey to help you go further
in yours so don't forget to subscribe and hit that little bell icon to never miss an opportunity to
keep making this video is all about bringing together what you've learned of mesh what you've
learned of objects the 3d cursor in origin and putting them all together so you start
to understand where i'm going with this frankly it's one of those fundamental building blocks
within blender that isn't covered early enough within the blender learning curve be it precision
modeling or not but within precision modeling this is so crucial because it is the fundamental
step to understand how to get precision movement and then how an add-on uses that exact type of
precision movement style to get incredible sub millimeter precision within a mesh workflow so
here we are within a nice fresh new blender file and this video is all about sort of the connection
points of all the information we've understand so far so we know that this cube is made of this
mesh within edit mode that has vertices edges and faces and then all of this is within an object and
this object has this origin point and the origin point is sort of very closely connected with the
3d cursor because when you go ahead and you make a new object it has its own origin point there and
it's in the center of that object but that's about as far as we've got really so let's go ahead let's
delete what i've just done there and something that i probably didn't put across too well in the
last video is that everything here that you're seeing is an object this camera is an object it
has an origin point this light is an object it has an origin point yes you cannot take this camera
into edit mode because what is there to edit there is no mesh within it there is nothing editable
within the camera but for objects that contain a mesh they can very much be put into edit mode
so let's go ahead and let's go into edit mode with this object so we know here we have this
collection of mesh that creates this cube now what we did in the last video is we were duplicating
objects so what happens if we use our shift d and duplicate within edit mode with everything
selected well it duplicates things that's for sure and we can constrain it exactly the same we can
set units in exactly the same and we can hit enter but we've seen what is fundamentally different
there is only one origin point here that is because now this object that was called cube
has two cubes so let's go ahead and let's rename this renaming do you remember the shortcut it's f2
and let's actually call this object one so object one has the mesh information of two separate cubes
i think you're starting to understand now the real correlation between mesh and object here
now let's go ahead and let's say that i wanted this to be two separate objects
so let's go into edit mode and you'll see that this is already all selected another way
of selecting sort of this separated mesh is using control L and that is selects linked so with that
all selected let's go ahead and part this mesh from the object now i exaggerate that because
in blender it's called separate but we're going to be using the shortcut key of p and this is for
parting what we have within our object into its own thing and we're going to go by selection this
time around so by selection go back into object mode and you're going to see that we have object 1
and then object 1.001 so this means that this cube that we duplicated from its mesh
now is an object and it's inherited the name of where it's come from so let's go ahead and
let's rename this and let's call it object 2 and this object 2 has something quite interesting
the origin point is over here what on earth is going on like we are used to seeing an origin
point inside of all the meshes we've been creating so far that is because it actually doesn't matter
whatsoever the origin point is completely independent of the information that it holds
so that means origin points can be moved and lo and behold guess what controls that the 3d cursor
so let's go ahead and let's snap on to vertices and let's snap on to oops onto this vertex
here okay so we've snapped the 3d cursor there and now what happens how do i move this origin
point to there well i make sure i have what i want selected i right click on it and you'll
see this lovely menu right there that says set origin now you can go ahead and set the origin
to geometry which is the default way that objects come in it's sort of the median center of mass
but it's just sort of approximately calculated because you'll see when we get into
more complicated things that can move the origin point sort of into space as well but what was
more interesting is this one here origin to 3d cursor now the main thing that i want to remember
is that the origin point is the origin of also movement scale and rotation within
object mode by default yes this can be changed and i'll show you how to do that in the future
but just for now keep it that simple so now we know that we can move the origin point and the
3d cursor controls a lot with the origin point so let's go ahead and let's snap the 3d cursor here
and the 3d cursor had a snapping menu do you remember that shortcut that is shift s and yes
this is where we can move the 3d cursor to its world origin but it's also where we can move the
selection to the cursor so within object mode the selection obviously has an origin point and that's
what we're moving which means we are now precisely moving this origin point to the snapped 3d cursor
and right there is how you do very precise movement yes this is extremely long-winded
but i want you to understand this before we jump into some much more advanced movement controls
which we won't be using this at all but it's very fundamental because it works off the principles of
this so let's go ahead and let's duplicate object one here so that was shift d let's constrain it on
the x let's go five millimeters but in the other direction let's hit enter so let's say that i
wanted the mesh information inside of this object let's go ahead and rename it now let's go object
three let's say the mesh information inside of object three i want that to be a part of object
two because i really like where its origin point is i don't know let's say this was uh the doorknob
on a door and this is the door and it's going to swing open from there well to do this order of
selection is very important because i'm sure you might have noticed something a little bit strange
so for instance if we go into edit mode and we select everything and maybe you were selecting
things individually you have this one white vertex this is the active point the active vertex or what
is active of the selection usually it's the last one that you've selected in object mode it's
exactly the same if you select two things you're going to see that there's this darker outline and
this lighter outline that's because this is the active selection you can sort of think of it that
this here is the parent of this child this does most of the controlling aspects of what's going on
and that is important because we're about to join two objects and considering that two objects have
two origin points we need to tell blender which origin point we want to keep as you can imagine
we're going to keep the parents so let's go ctrl j and now you can see that the origin point has just
disappeared from this cube it's now all in object two and that is the main thing that i wanted you
to understand so now let's quickly separate these once again because i want to show you that there's
a quick way of separating loose objects so back into edit mode let's deselect basically everything
here let's go p and you're going to see loose parts so if you have a loose mesh this is the
quickest way of basically separating everything so there we have it loose parts but you will see
our object that was object 3 now has its origin point back over there let's set its origin point
back to the geometry like this and it is also inherited where it is just being released from
so it's now object 2.001 and that there fundamentally is what i wanted to get across
which is this whole idea of origin points 3d cursors and how they really influence each other
a huge well done for getting this far along in the series yes i know blender fundamentals can feel
like they go on forever but you're almost there you're almost over the speed bump that is blender
fundamentals and believe me when i say i really do think that for how far you are along in such
short amount of time for some people that have been doing and learning blender for maybe even
three or four months you know more about the fundamentals of blender than they do
that's for sure if you want a little something extra stick to the end a huge thank you to my
patrons you guys are absolutely awesome and it means so much to me in fact it's the real
reason why i can do things like this and if you're enjoying what i'm doing here and think
i'm worthy of your support i would love to see you there too don't forget that we have a discord and
that is linked down in the description thank you for watching keep making and let the quest
continue and for the bold of you that have made it to the end of the video there is a short little
obstacle course down in the description along with a solution video to check your answers