Blender Realtime Proportional Edit

NOTE: This is purely a result of an accident and I'm not yet sure if this is already published elsewhere or tested before already.


Just discovered something nifty in Blender and I thought it might be worth sharing (to those not aware yet); when editing meshes in Edit Mode and with Proprtional Editing on, you can press the keyboard shortcut 'SHIFT O' to switch between Falloff types (smooth, sphere, root, random, etc.).

OK, great, but you can easily do that by clicking on the buttons, right? However, that's not the point of this guide.  There's something to this hotkey that surprised me; you can do it WHILE modifying the mesh, and this you CAN'T do with clicking the buttons since the buttons disappear while editing the mesh (e.g. grabbing vertices, scaling, etc.) since the buttons are replaced by the transform options.

Here's a simple demo (click images to enlarge):

1. Create a Plane (SHIFT A, choose Plane) and subdivide it a couple of times (TAB to Edit Mode and press W, then choose Subdivide) until you have enough polygons to work with.



2. For demo purposes, select a single vertex from the subdivided plane (middle one preferably).



3. Turn on Proportional Edit by either pressing 'O' or pressing the toggle button.




4. Move this vertex up along the Z-axis (G, then Z).




5. While on this transform mode (do not confirm or cancel the transformation yet), press 'SHIFT O' and you'll instantly notice that you are changing the Falloff mode and previewing it on your 3D Viewport Editor.


















6. When satisfied with the result, press ENTER to confirm transformation.

Hope this helps. ;)

-Reyn