+ B0008 - Blender's Vital Functions+
Instructor - Pradeep Mamgain
+ Vital Functions +
In this tutorial I will cover the most fundamental building blocks of everything in Blender, The Datablocks.
+ Objects and Datablocks +
Objects and Datablocks are the fundamental building blocks of everthing you do in blender. It’s often necessary to make adjustments to the modeling of a character in the middle of an animation. You might need to fix texturing or modeling problems that you didn’t notice before beginning to animate. In particular, using linked datablocks can eliminate the need to re-edit or reappend the same datablock into different scenes or shots.
The basic 3D entity in blender is an object. All objects have the characteristics of location, rotation, and size. 3D object types include the following:
• Meshes
• NURBs curves/surfaces
• Bezier curves
• Meta objects
• Armatures
• Lattices
• Text objects
• Empties
• Cameras
• Lamps
In addition to location, scale, and rotation, each 3D object is associated with a datablock of specific information to its type. In the case of the Empty object, there is no other information besides this basic 3D object information. All objects of a particular type also have type-specific datablocks associated with them. A Mesh object requires a Mesh datablock, for example, and a Lamp object requires a Lamp datablock. This datablock contains information pertinent to the thing itself.
The properties specific to a mesh, such as the placement of its vertices and faces, are contained in the Mesh datablock. Don’t get confused by the object itself and object’s type specific data block. A mesh in the blender essentially refers to the mesh datablock associated with Mesh object.
Select a cube in your scene and have a look at the Link and Material panel in the button window. There are two boxes at the top. ME:Cube and OB:Cube. ME:Cube is current datablock name, OB:Cube is active object name. Object and Datablocks has separate namespaces so naming them identical is not a problem at all.
First field is light pink and second one is gray. Gray field starts with OB and name of the object. This name has to be unique within the .blend file across all the scenes. Field on the left starts with two letters ME, it can be…
ME: Physical Mesh made of vertices.
CU: Curve, Surface or Text Object made up of Control Points.
MB: Metaball, whose skin is represented as the mathematical function.
Any of these skins can be shared by the objects. Clicking F will fake a use of the skin and it will not be deleted when no one uses it. Next time when you open the blend file, it will be in the memory and you don’t have to create it again. You can create an object of this type and use that skin.
To see this in action. We will clone the object. Create a cube and press ALT+D key to make a clone of the original. Now the two object will share the same skin. When you alter one object in the edit mode, another linked object will also get altered in relatively. This linking usually works in edit mode.
Drop a Cube and Cone Mesh in 3D window. If you click on them and look at the Link and Material Panel you will something like as show in image below.
Left Click on the small double arrow icon which is located to the left where ME:Cube is written. Click on that arrow, a popup will appear, cone will be there as an option.
Select it and cube object is now a cone. Now if you alter any one of the two objects, both objects will reflect the changes made. Click on the double arrow icon again, you will notice a small circle to the left of the word cube. This circle indicates that cube is an unused datablock. Save your file and restart blender, you would notice that, Cube mesh is now gone.
If you want to persist with an unused datablock, slecting the datablock you want to make persistent and clicking F creates a fake user for the datablock so that it will not be discarded at shutdown. Now if you click on the double arrow icon, you will see F letter to the left of the word, Cube.
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