The empty mesh is just what the name says: a mesh without vertices. You will use this mesh if you want to create your mesh completely from scratch by “drawing” vertex after vertex and or using other tools like spin to create rotation symmetric objects as constructed in the wineglass tutorial. The creation of the empty mesh is easy but because it is empty you won’t see much after it is created. So here is a small “pictured tutorial” how to do it:

GO TO OBJECT MODE!

There press the SPACE bar. You will see a popup menu where you can navigate to the “Empty Mesh” button:

After you clicked on the Empty Mesh button, you will see… nothing… Well indeed something has changed, but it is not very obvious. The Transform manipulator has appeared:

You simply can not see the object at the moment as it is hidden by the manipulator. So what you do next is disable the manipulator here:

Just click on the hand icon and disable so that it is “unchecked”. Now after the manipulator is removed you see this little tiny pink dot right in the middle of the 3D cursor ? This is the Empty Mesh. Well what did you expect ? An empty mesh is … empty:

Attention here! This pink dot is NOT a vertex. It is the object center!!! Currently “the center of nothing”…

Now go to Edit mode:

From now on hold down the CTRL key and then each left click will create a new vertex. it will automatically be connected with an edge to the previous vertex. So vertex for vertex you “draw” your outline :

This small tutorial should make it clear how to get the Empty mesh to live.

Have fun, Gaia