Blender Tutorial for Beginners: How To Make A Mushroom

Loop Cut and Slide

At the moment, your object doesn’t look much like a mushroom, does it? Before you can deform your cylinder to look like a mushroom, you’ll need to add a few more segments. To add segments you’ll need to do a loop cut; either activate the Loop Cut tool from the Toolbox or press the CTRL/Command + R shortcut to start creating a new loop cut.

Now move your mouse over the side of the cylinder, and you’ll see a yellow edge ring show up.

Now the exact way this works depends on the way you start the loop cut:

• Loop Cut Tool: Click and drag the ring, you’ll notice it will turn orange and will follow your cursor. Drag the ring about up until there’s about a third left, then release the mouse button.
• Loop Cut Shortcut: Click once so the ring turns orange and starts following your cursor. Drag the ring about up until there’s about a third left, then click to confirm.

If you don’t like where the loop ended up, use CTRL/Command + Z to undo the action.

Now double tap the A key to deselect all vertices.

Selecting Vertices, Edges, and Faces

You could select the edges to be moved by holding Shift and clicking, each of them, but that can be cumbersome when you’ve got a lot of edges to select. Fortunately, there are several ways to select multiple items!

Selection Tools

Click and hold the Select Box Tool in the Toolbox. Most of the tool icons have little arrows indicating they’re part of a group. In the case of the Select Box Tool, it’s part of a selection tools group, so you can switch to a Select Circle Tool or a Select Lasso Tool.

You can activate another tool in the same group by releasing your mouse button while hovering over the tool you want to use.

Here’s an overview of the selection tools:

• Select Box: Drag and hold a selection box around a selection. Release to confirm.
• Select Circle: Drag and hold a circle over a selection. Release to confirm
• Select Lasso: Drag and hold a free-form shape around a selection. Release to confirm.

With each of these, holding Shift while selecting will add to the selection and holding CTRL/Command will remove from the selection.

Edge Loop Selection Shortcut

Besides the selection tools, there’s another way to select an edge loop, with a handy shortcut! Hold ALT/Option and click on an edge in the loop you want to select, this will select the whole loop. As with other ways of selecting, holding Shift while doing this will add to your selection and holding CTRL/Command will subtract from the selection.

Transforming Edges, Vertices, and Faces

Transforming edges, vertices, and faces is very similar to transforming an entire object: you can use the same tools and shortcuts to move, rotate and scale your selection. I will focus on the shortcut keys as it’s good practice to use and remember those, but feel free to use the tools from the Toolbar instead.

Select the horizontal edge loop you added last if it isn’t selected yet, press the G key to move the vertices followed by the Z key to constrain the movement to the Z-axis. Now move your cursor up until the edge loop is near the top of the model and click to confirm.

Add some more detail to the cylinder by doing two more loop cuts near the bottom. Use either the Loop Cut Tool or the CTRL/Command + R shortcut to do this.

Now it’s time to alter the edges and faces to create the top of your mushroom!
Select the top edge loop and press S to scale the edge loop. Next, drag your cursor inwards so the edge loop shrinks and confirm with a click:

Next, you need to make the bottom edge of the top of the mushroom larger than the top. Select the second and third edge loops from the bottom and scale them up until you get a nice mushroom cap shape. Remember to hold Shift to add to your selection.

The lower edge of your mushroom looks a little thin, time to learn another trick! Double tap A to deselect everything and select just the third edge loop from the top. Now double tap the G key, this activates Edge Slide mode, which allows you to slide edges between edge loops smoothly. Move your cursor up until the bottom faces are a fair bit bigger and click to confirm.

It’s looking more like a mushroom now!

Using the Extrude Tool

Your mushroom head is looking pretty good, but every good mushroom needs a stalk! You’ll do this by using the extrude tool.
Move the view around so you can see the bottom of the mushroom head. You’re going to create the stalk by extruding the bottom faces of your mushroom head.

Switch to Face Select mode by clicking the Face Select icon or press the 3 key on your number row.

Now select the inner fan of faces on the bottom using any of the selection techniques and press the E key to start extruding. As soon as you do so, your mouse movement extrudes the selected faces, creating a stem. Move your cursor down until the stem is about as big as the cap and click to confirm.

Now extrude the same faces one more time just a bit to create the rounded bottom of the stalk.

Now scale the faces inward by a small amount to create a beveled edge.

[spoiler title=”Solution Inside: Can’t remember how to scale?”]
Press the S key, move inwards with your cursor and click to confirm.
[/spoiler]

Your mushroom should look similar to this fine specimen:

Changing the Object Origin

Your mushroom is sprouting up nicely! However, at the moment your mushroom is almost fully buried underground, as shown in this front view:

You’ll need to move your mushroom upwards a little bit to have it sitting properly on the XY plane. You could just eyeball it, select all faces and move the whole mesh up until it looks about right, but it’s good practice to align things neatly. In order to get the mushroom placed perfectly, you will need to do some steps:

1. Move the 3D cursor to the lowest center point of the mushroom.
2. Set the origin of the mushroom to to where the 3D cursor is at.
3. Move the mushroom to the world origin.

To start off, double tap the A key to deselect everything. Next, switch to Vertex Select mode and select the center bottom vertex in the stalk.

Now press Shift + S and choose Cursor to Selected. The 3D cursor moved to the selected vertex, which is exactly where the origin should be placed.

Hit Tab to switch to Object Mode. Right click the mushroom and choose Set Origin ► Origin to 3D Cursor to move the origin to the bottom.

Now move the mushroom back to the world origin by setting its position to (X:0, Y:0, Z:0). Either change its Z location to 0 in the Properties region or simply press ALT/Option + G to clear the location, Blender is all about shortcuts after all!

Making a “pop” sound effect is optional while doing this, but it sure is fun. :]
Now don’t forget to save all your hard work. Navigate to File ► Save, or simply press CTRL/Command + S to open the save dialog. Next, choose a good location, name your project “Mushroom.blend” and hit Enter twice or click the Save As button.

At this point you’ve already created a mushroom from scratch so pat yourself on the back! While your mushroom could be used as-is if you really wanted to, I hope you’ll agree that a dash of color would make it even better.