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Mesh Item

Mesh Items are often referred to as geometry layers as this is how they appear in the Item List, as individual layers. However, these layers can also be thought of more like containers that hold the various geometry components - vertices, edges, and polygons. Mesh Items are usually the heroes of any project; the actual surfaces that are rendered. Each individual mesh layer is its own self-contained object, with its own set of channels, item transforms, as well as UV maps, Weight Maps, and any other associated Vertex Maps.

Mesh Items are animated by transforming their position, rotation and scale channels, or by using Deformers to bend and twist the geometry contained within. Component-level changes modify the contents contained within the layer, and can generally be applied independent of the animation assigned to the item. The difference between component edits and Item-level edits is a very important concept to understand. If you ever find that you have performed Item-level transforms when you intended to do component transforms, you can use the Freeze options found on the item's Properties panel to return the center location back to the World Origin.

You can add additional Mesh Items to a scene by pressing the Add Item button in the upper-right corner of the Item List and selecting the Mesh option from the pop-up menu. Additionally, you can use the menu bar command Geometry > New Mesh Item. Finally, you can also easily create an empty mesh layer by simply pressing the N keyboard shortcut while in the Model interface layout. When the Mesh Item is selected, its associated attributes become available for selection and you can edit it within the Properties viewport panel.

Additional Draw Options

For all item types there are additional GL drawing properties that allow you to customize the UI for rigging in a number of ways, covered below in more detail. Options are toggled on/off with associated buttons in the Display sub-tab when the target item is selected. The action creates an additional sub-tab that appeares alongside the others in the Properties panel.

Show/Hide Dimensions - when this option is enabled, an additional sub-tab appears in the Properties panel titled Dimensions. By default, dimension lines and values for the overall bounding box size appear in the viewport around a Mesh Item. The attributes in the Properties panel allow you to further customize the information that is displayed. Linking a series of items together through a hierarchy allows the display of distances between each object's Center point, from parent to child (and only when the parent item is selected the dimension values display).