Tutorial Critter

Okay, so, here's a sort of tutorial-in-a-model for a couple of things:

(I'll do a tutorial or quicktip in the Thingiverse Blog later on modifiers in general and subsurface modeling in particular.)

Subsurface modeling:
The critter here was created by taking the default cube and using the Modifier tab: add Modifier: Subsurf. Clicking the little circle whose tooltip reads "apply modifier to editing cage during edit mode" will give you the awesome function of having the edges of the mesh seem to curve around the smoothed-out mesh.

The result is a ball in edit mode made of six squarish patches. You can extrude these like faces and Blender will show you this soft, organic-looking mesh that is way more intuitive than strict polygons. The critter was made doing nothing more than extruding this funny soft mesh around.

I've included the Blender file of this stage in the modeling so you can go to edit mode yourself and see how a completed mesh can have hundreds of faces in the fin