Mirroring is another Blender process that relies heavily on the Object Origin. That point is going to determine where the invisible mirror is going to be placed. Our newly modeled base is a great illustration. By default, the Object Origin is still right in the middle of our default cube. We put thought into the sizing of our plate. With a mirror placed there, we would be losing some of the length of our base.
Our final dimensions would fall short of the plan:
However, if the Object Origin was moved to the right edge of our base, then mirroring would truly duplicate our work:
Blender allows the Object Origin to be changed on demand. For our bracelet plate, we are going to set the Object Origin to a specific vertex on the far right side of our model. The steps are as follows:
- In Object Mode and right-click on our object (in this case, the cube) to select it.
- Switch to Edit Mode.
- If necessary, click on the Vertex Select icon. Right-click to select the vertex you'd like to make your Object Origin. In the case of our bracelet plate, select one of the vertices in what will be the middle, the straight side of the plate:
- In the menu at the bottom of your screen, select Mesh | Snap | Cursor to Selected. This moves the 3D Cursor to the exact position of the selected vertex:
- Switch back to Object Mode.
- In the menu at the bottom of the screen, select Mesh | Transform | Origin to 3D Cursor. This tells Blender to change the Object Origin to where the 3D Cursor is:
After these steps are performed, the yellow dot and axis arrows are moved and reflect our newly-defined Object Origin:
