Particles are lots of items emitted from mesh objects, typically in the thousands. Each particle can be a point of light or a mesh, and be joined or dynamic. They may react to many different influences and forces, and have the notion of a lifespan. Dynamic particles can represent fire, smoke, mist, and other things such as dust or magic spells. Static particles form strands and can represent hair, grass and bristles.

submitted: 5 years and 3724 days ago

Armatures are comprised of Bones. Editing an Armature in Edit Mode allows you to manipulate the bones in their default rest position.

submitted: 5 years and 3724 days ago

Armatures are like articulated skeletons, that allow you to pose and deform the geometry that surrounds it. An armature is made of a series of bones connected to each other via parenting or constraints. Armatures are most often used in character animation, as a manipulatable skeleton to pose a character, but they can also be useful in other situations too.

submitted: 5 years and 3724 days ago

A lattice is a framework of controlling vertices. Associated a mesh to a lattice is a nice way to apply deformations to the mesh while modeling, but it is also a way to make animated deformations in time! To deform the mesh, you can deform the parent Lattice; the mesh deforms to fit inside the Lattice.

submitted: 5 years and 3724 days ago

Shape Keys are the specified positions of vertices within an Object; the actual points that define the mesh. Since this can involve thousands of vertices for an object, separate motion curves are not created for each vertex because it would overload your computer's memory.
Let's get into some more details here...

submitted: 5 years and 3724 days ago

Shape keys store different shapes of the same mesh. In other 3d applications they are called 'morph targets' or 'blend shapes' or even 'vertex keys' in older versions of Blender.

submitted: 5 years and 3724 days ago

A different way to have Objects move in the space is to constrain them to follow a given path. Sometimes objects need to follow a specific path through a minefield, or it is just too hard to animate a special kind of movement with the keyframe method. For example, a planet following its way around the Sun - animating that with keyframes is virtually impossible. In these cases, a special type of curve object called a Path can be used as the path for another object to follow.

submitted: 5 years and 3724 days ago

Painting in the 3D view has been improved to support projection painting which allows you to paint directly onto your model without having to worry about seams or unwrapping manually.

submitted: 5 years and 3724 days ago

A UV Texture is an image that is a picture (image, sequence or movie) that is used to color the surface of a mesh. The UV Texture is mapped to the mesh through one or more UV maps. There are three ways to establish the image used by the UV Texture. Let's see them!

submitted: 5 years and 3724 days ago

Up to this point, we have only talked about half of UV Textures; the UV map and layout. The layout is the arrangement of all the UV maps. Each UV map 'maps' image pixels to a mesh face. There is one UV map for each seam or sub-mesh. The entire layout is colored by an image. Blender provides several features that help you when working with the image part of the UV Texture. Blender also includes a built-in texture painting program. This tutorial discusses how to use images effectively.

submitted: 5 years and 3724 days ago