Today, I have something important to talk about. This important thing is metaballs.
No, not meatballs.
A metaball is, in fact, this:
This, on the other hand, is a metaball.
Now, what is a metaball, exactly? Well, a metaball is a “loosely defined object with a spherical, cuboid, or tuboid shape.” Now, since metaballs obviously are just balls in object mode, let’s see how we can edit these amazing objects by going into edit mode.
It still mostly looks like this.
We’re in edit mode, and nothing interesting happens. There are no vertices, no faces, no nothings. Only two circles. This is already quite useless. Well, let’s try pressing some of the usual editing keys. We’ll use shift-d, the duplication command…
It's like biology, only greyer and more boring...
As you can see, we have something similar to cellular mitosis going on here. The metaball starts out big, then splits in two. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much the only interesting thing these objects can be used for. The point of meta objects is to combine different shapes in the way that I just did to create stuff. It’s just too bad that we have the much more efficient vertex-based modelling, which is vastly superior to metaballs in every single way possible, ever. I cannot think of any situation in which I would rather use a metaball than a good ol’-fashioned mesh. So, to put it bluntly, metaballs suck metaballs. I would’ve put in an image of metaballs here, but the metaballs sucked too much to make a good ball sack.