That’s some awesome geometry that can be created! Strange how it works though… I just made a flying saucer out of a cylinder 
I made one that resembled a pagoda. 
i don’t get it …i just get a plain cube 
Try this,…select only the corner vertices. You’ll get it.
It’s great to see how people discover NEW FEATURES in blender every day that have been there for ages 
It’s even better when people start CODING new features, and I slip into #blendersauce and tell them “Hey dude… uhm… you know… that feature exists”…
I guess I should once again, out of my infinite goodwill, give you a link to my hotkey list
Oooooh, aaaaah, nice shapes!!! 8)
I always thought it would be nice to have a Blender repository of objects that one can use to pull into ones own .blends. Now, i was mostly thinking of stuff like
furniture
trees, plants
particle setups (like Sysadm’s Effects files at http://www.centralsource.com/blender/effects.htm)
materials (ala mathlib)
etc.
However, looking at this, something more whimsical would also be very nice. Maybe we should create a sticky thread in WIP or in Finished with ‘weird shapes’ This .blend certainly would be a candidate, as would the Blender beveled primitives by Dave Weese and most of the fur balls we used to play with in the Blender community; jms’s potatoids (http://jmsoler.free.fr/didacticiel/blender/tutor/english/python_script05.htm) would also fit the bill.
The interest would be that the files show more a technique of getting to the shapes rather than the actual weird shapes themselves, if you get my drift.
Ah well, I’ll crawl back under my rock now.
I’m totally with you. I was thinking the same thing myself. I even have some objects of ambiguous functionality to contribute. Just as soon as I finish my textures blend for the texture fest.
Sorry to bump this tread up, but this has been bothering me a bit… :-?
I cannot seem to get anything near Endi quality ‘things’ using his rudimentary technique.
- make a cube and subdiv it 3x or 4x
OK, create cube, go into edit, select all, press Subdivide mesh tool… - smooth the vertices 3x or 4x
OK, stay in Edit and press the Smooth mesh tool a couple of times
(doesn’t seem to have much effect though…) - alt+s and wondering…
alt+s and move the mouse I guess
If I do this, all I get is a kind of ball object…
So I think I need to deselect all and select a few vertices…
but which ones? How? Border Select? Border Select circular?
How do I select them symetrically? - switch on the subsurf
Up to now, all I get here is a subsurfed piece of cr*p… :x
I really want to create the kind of stuff endi showed. Any hints? Tips? 
just subdivide 3 or 4 times, hit alt+s, move mouse. That oughta do it.
No it’s like this,…first you have to screw up your normals just a touch. One way to do this is with the proportional editing tool. So screw up your faces a bit before you do it, then do it repetetively. You don’t always just alt S something once. Sometimes you have to do it in both directions a few times or repetetively in the same direction, just to get your normals screwed up enough so they will start doing those mad flips, as seen with endis work. The best way I have found to screw up normals is with PET, and I did a thread on it in general entitled ‘I found a new sculpting method’ if you want to give it a try.