MODELLING CONCEPTS
The Empty
Blender's Empties
An empty has no geometry.
They have positional, rotational and scaling information which can be used in hundreds of ways across blender. They are best considered to be organisational and control objects in blender. We will use a lot of empties for a huge variety of tasks in subdivision surface modelling.
Empties are a great organisational tool when used as parent objects for groups of other objects which you want to control as one.
Since they do not render, you have great control over the position, scale and rotation of a group of meshes without a visible point. This can be particularly useful when the child objects have their own animation. An example of this can be seen in the "Rigid Body Text" Video.
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Empties are regularly use as targets for contraints. Very commonly a camera rig will be created with a "Track to" constraint restricting the camera's point of interest to follow the empty. Often a second empty would be used with this camera rig and set to be the target for the "depth of field" in the camera's properties.
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Empties are also used to great effect as an offset when using the array modifier. Particularly when creating circular arrays. Very complicated arrangements of duplicates of an object can be achieved just by altering the transformations of the empty.
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Empties are commonly use to place reference images in your modelling environment in order to closely match the details of plans and drawings.
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There are many more uses of empties when used as the targets for other modifiers and I hope to cover many of these usage scenarios across several of my videos.
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There are several options when creating an empty in blender using the "Add Menu", but these options relate only to their display in the viewport. There is no other difference between any of the empties.
When meshes are dense or you have a lot of meshes in your scene, it can be difficult to see and select them so it is a good idea to change the default colour of your empties in the preferences panel (which can be found at the bottom of the edit menu).
Once the properties panel is open select the "Themes" button and find the "3d viewport" Section.
Open this and find the category for "Empty".
You can click on the colour swatch beside it's name to bring up a colour picker to change the display colour of the empties. I usually set this to pure green which makes empties much easier to work with.
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Changing the default colour of Empties