Glossary

Published on by . Last updated .

3D Cursor

Category: Blender

Cursor is an important concept in Blender. It is this small circle with red/white strips and 4 black lines. It essentially describes as a location in 3D space. You can place it at a specific location. Then it can be used to create objects in that specific place or move things towards that specific place. Read this article from official Blender documentation to learn more.

Mentioned in:

Apps

Category: MyApps

Apps are small programs that you can open in MyApps, an organization tool on the web. In theory, there can be an App for everything. You can spawn as many Apps of any type as you want, turning MyApps into the perfect custom software go-to solution for your personal needs.

Mentioned in:

Edge Loop

Category: Blender

An Edge Loop is a continous single line that you can follow on multiple vertices. It is a chain of edges basically. A single vertex might be connect to more then 2 vertices, thus there can be more than 2 Edge Loops running over a vertex. We usually add Edge Loops to add more detail to our models. They can be a hard concept to wrap your head around at first. You can read this official Blender documentation article which talks about 'Selecting (Edge) Loops', which can give you a good idea and foundation to work with Edge Loops. Also, here is the official Blender documentation article about 'Loop Cuts', which basically talks about adding new edge loops.

Mentioned in:

Edge Loop Select

Category: Blender

Selecting an Edge Loop: You can read this official Blender documentation article which talks about 'Selecting (Edge) Loops'.

Mentioned in:

Extrude

Category: Blender

Extruding a vertex, edge or face duplicated it but keeps it connected to the original vertex, edge or face. It is like 'extending' something to add a new vertex, edge or face. It is pretty useful and we will use it a lot when modeling in Blender. Here is official Blender documentation for 'extruding'.

Mentioned in:

Knife Projection

Category: Blender

Knife Projections allows for vertices of an object to be transferred onto another. Please see the excellent entry in official Blender documentation.

Mentioned in:

MatCap

Category: Blender

MatCap stands for Material Capture. It is a 'baked in' material full with colors and reflections. It requires no lighting in your scene, as it is only a tool to help you view your models in the 3D Viewport.

Mentioned in:

Modes

Category: Blender

Blender features a few 'modes' that makes it logically easier to work with this complex 3D program. Each mode activates special features of Blender that are specialized for different things: Object mode makes it easy to select whole objects. Edit Mode allows you to edit individual vertices, edges and faces of models. Sculpt mode, well, helps you do 3D sculpting (similar to ZBrush). The most important 2 modes are Object Mode and Edit Mode.

Mentioned in:

MyApps

Category: MyApps

MyApps is an organization tool on the web that features infinite workspace, multiple apps, complete data privacy, data sync across devices, real-time collaboration, full offline functionality and cross browser/device support. It is in active development currently only by me.

Mentioned in:

Nginx

Category: Programming

nginx ("engine x") is an HTTP web server, reverse proxy, content cache, load balancer, TCP/UDP proxy server, and mail proxy server.

Mentioned in:

Normals

Category: Blender

Normals refer to the orientation of the faces. Think of it like the covers of a book. A book has a front cover and a back cover. For a 3D object, say a cube, we expect the faces looking outside to be like a 'front cover', and the faces looking inside to be like a 'back cover'. Sometimes in Blender, the orientation of all or some faces will be messed up. In such cases we need to recalculate normals. To do this, we select all or some faces, and hit SHIFT+N in Edit Mode to recalculate the Normals 'outside'. To calculate them 'inside', we hit CTRL+SHIFT+N.

Mentioned in:

Open Data Benchmark

Category: Blender

Open Data Benchmark is a user contributed resource for all possible hardware on which Blender was tested. A certain metric tells us how performant a device is when we run Blender on it. This test is mostly render speed, which is an acceptable way to testing overall performance of the device in question.

Mentioned in:

Pressing a Key?

Category: Blender

There are lot of shortcuts, key presses and key combinations in Blender. Most of the time, you can click on menus and buttons to get away with not learning all the shortcuts. However you only need to learn a few to get far.
In my blog posts, I animated key buttons to describe the action you are supposed to do (hold, press, combine etc.). Just hover over them to see the animation.

Some tips: 'Drag' means moving your mouse, often by hold pressing a key or a combination of keys (LMB, SHIFT + MMB, etc.)

'Press' a combination: Sometimes you have to 'press' a combination of keys. A combination often describe 2 or more keys pressed together, which of course means that you need to 'hold' the first key while 'pressing' the second (or last) key in the combination. Key animations in my blog like SHIFT + A will describe this behavior: While the first key shows a 'hold' animation, the second key shows a 'press' animation (i.e. hit and release).

Mentioned in:

Reference Images

Category: Blender

Like the muse of a painter, the reference images give both an idea of the proportions and a source of inspiration to the 2D/3D digital 'painter'. In your entire journey as a 2D/3D artists, beginning of every new project will include researching, finding, collecting and organizing your reference images. Heck, I even made a software for that!

Mentioned in:

Sighting

Category: Blender

Sighting is a tool used generally by traditional painters that use a canvas. In this technique, they hold their thumb or more commonly a pencil towards their subject (a muse, a building), and measure dimensions and distances. With sighting, they convert proportions of their subject to a basic unit applicable to the painting on their canvas. As a result their paintings accurately reflect the proportions of the real world subject. See this blog post for more information.

Mentioned in:

Transformation

Category: Blender

Transformation refers to the fundemental operations that we can exert upon an object in 3D space. These are MOVE, ROTATE and SCALE. Within Blender we use these three operations frequently. For more information, refer to Blender documentation on basics of transformation.

Mentioned in:

Viewport

Category: Blender

Blender's Viewport shows you the 3D scene that you are working on. It is the place where you will spend most of your time in Blender. If I tried to explain everything about it, it would be a long and boring blog post. Instead, visit 3D viewport article group in official Blender documentation. Skim through the pages and familiarize yourself with it.

Mentioned in:

Welcome

Category: Ideas of Hakki

In my blog, you will often see 'glossary terms' such as this one. I usually reference a Glossary term for a new word introduced in a blog post, and one that deserves a seperate explanation, such that the flow of the main text is protected.
If you click the small w? link, it will highlight the word that refered to this glossary item in the blog post. The referring word will be followed by a [g] symbol, which highlights this glossary box when clicked.

Mentioned in:

Workspace

Category: MyApps

A Workspace in MyApps is an infinite pannable/zoomable 2D space where you can open, use, organize, group and delete Apps. It is similar to Canva Whiteboard or Miro's Workspace, except that you don't draw or place images in there: You open fully functional apps or applets and get work done in these Apps instead.

Mentioned in: