Proportional Editing with Blender

When you are spending some time to design a wonderful piece of jewelry for you or maybe your customer, Blender 3D has many tools that will help you progress through your design quickly. CAD software can be intimidating to most of us, but don’t let that stop you from learning. I still feel that modeling jewelry with Blender is much more intuitive than other Free open source software.

Blender 3d offers many functions and tools for modeling. One of these tools is called Proportional Editing. In part three of my series, we are going to cover one way that you can use proportional editing to make interesting designs for a simple ring. Part 4 will cover the final stages of the design, but for now, practice the use of this tool as shown in the video.

Some tips for using the proportional editing tool with your mouse...

As you saw in the video, the proportional tool can be turned on and off with your mouse, by clicking on the switch icon for the tool. If you prefer to use your keyboard, press the “o” key, to turn it on and off.

Once you have turned it on, and selected an ‘edge’ or a ‘face’, you’ll notice that a circle will show on the screen around the area you wish to make changes to. This circle is called the “circle of influence”, and the amount of influence you apply can be changed with your mouse wheel, which will adjust the size of the circle.

You can make changes to any of the three modeling objects, “edges, faces and vertexes”. I suggest that you spend some time with basic models, and try several of the types of proportional editing structures to find the best that will match the design you are working on.

Have fun, and don’t forget to check out parts one and two!