I am amusing myself trying to understand what is going on inside the head of one of the Blender developer who designed the extrude function.
Trying to imagine (Please read with a cartoon evil tone with hands rubbing together):
"Hmm, I shall designed it so that when they press the E key, it extrudes the face ! But if they don’t want to do that, they would naturally press esc or cancel it with a mouse click [right or left depending on the key the user set to select, hence choose the opposite] because that’s how other operations are canceled…but wait !
That would be too easy ! Must…fxxk up the user…I shall share in the glory of bad UI design !
Unlike the common pattern of pressing esc or right/left click to cancel the action, I will just remove the extruded distance but the face will be left extruded !
Yes yes…that’s evil on a whole other level of UI consistency design…wah ha ha
The user will be none the wiser wah ha ha ha !!! Oh I just love the face of confusion in their eyes when they didn’t realize what they have done ! Wah ha ha ha !!!
To cancel that move, they will have to press control + z or press “a” to select all the faces, press w, wait for a panel to pop up and then click removes double ! Yes Yes this will be THE work flow wah ha ha ha! Kiss my ass Blender users ! Kiss my programmer ass !
I shall justify it by telling them this have to be the way because this is the way to insert polygons within a poly.
Technically I could implement Control + I to execute “Insert” the same way Control + B is used for Bevel but that would be too consistent and wouldn’t messed up the user the way that pleases me, I love to lick the tears that flows from their eyes of confusion…and PAIN !..[Invader Zim Crazy Laughter !]
I will be protected by my stockholm syndrome abused users who will defend me to the ends of the Earth anyway.
Let the evil way of implementing extrude be done !"
Scene of a Black House Behind a Gate with Thunder and Lighting !
Laughter: Wah ha ha ha ha WAH HA HA HA HA !
Current behaviour allow you change “extrusion way” - you can scale, alt-s or move and even apply some addon-magic to extrusion. And this is really helpful. And with Ctrl-z there is not problems with cancelling at all
I think maybe it’s because it’s like one of those Russian nesting dolls, two operators pretending to be one. So you press ‘e’ and you extrude but if Blender left it at that you would have faces that where coincident, hard to select and work with in the next step.
So Blender extrudes and immediate fires off a translate transform operator, that is the operator you are cancelling not the extrude when you press esc leaving you with faces that are coincident with each other when you do that.
(Programmer hands together playing his fingers together off each other, Drama Music)
Yes yes, you understand my deviously evil plan ! Those coincidental faces/polygons…the users will be NONE THE WISER ! Especially the new ones familiar with how every other software do it with their dedicated “insert” polygon/face function (because each function should do just one thing and one thing well but that’s not me…I am the great one who implemented right click to select, it has been a long time since I have implemented something equally evil like that…), oh I love their confusion when they look at the face count.
I should do something equally evil again…like maybe…pressing shift and clicking on multiple objects will append the selection on the viewport but on the layer buttons, just to Fxxk those stockholm syndrome abused even more who will always defend me, I shall change that to…Control instead of Shift to select more than one layer at once ! Just for the hack of it, just to Fxxk shxt up !
UI Consistency ? Bxtxh Please, I am the Blender Programmer, I know not of such things.
Wah ha ha ha Wah ha ha ha ha!
(End of Drama Music)
I gotta ask, is this a show stopper for you or can you learn to live with it?
I hope I am not sounding rude, that is not my intention. It’s just that there is no telling whether this is something easy to fix or not and Blender’s developers are always stretched thin. I don’t think you are the first person to notice this quirk in Blender so I have this feeling that they might already be aware of this particular issue but don’t have the time or people to resolve it.
I think you just have to live with extrude’s less than stellar existing/canceling behavior, it’s certainly not the only odd-ball tool in Blender.
EDIT If you are new to Blender, modules or areas of code in Blender often have one or two developers working on them and when the leave or are occupied in other areas then the tools they were working on tend to remain in the state the were in until someone else comes along. I think the main mesh tool developer Campbell is busy with Blender 101, there is another volunteer dev who works on mesh tools Howard but he might be occupied with other things as well.
I always thought this was a feature, pick some faces, extrude, esc, scale down, extrude again and so on. If you didn’t want to extrude you can just undo. Remember the operator is called “extrude region and move”, not just “extrude”.
I used to use POVray. When Moray went dead, I looked at Blender. For about five minutes. I glossed over it for years until I decided to get back into 3D rendering because I didn’t realize you right click to select.
Oh Geez, I remember Moray, made using PovRay bearable. I moved on to Lightwave (4.0) from Moray when it died. Stayed with LW up to release 9.6, then, for many reasons, dropped LW and moved to Blender. For those of us who started with PovRay, it is amazing to think we have this level of power for free.
I used to love the Moray material editor. I’d spend long spurts of time getting just the right material for whatever planet in whatever space scene I was rendering that day (I was a teenager) just right.
When I found out about Cycles material nodes I was like a kid in a candy shop.
Well, the reason for how this works this way is because “E” performs two functions: Extrude, then Grab/Move. By pressing “Esc”, you cancel only the grab, but extrusion was already applied. There were no evil intentions, this simply was the easiest way to program it. It’s flawed, sure, and should be rewritten… But we need a person willing to do that…
Now if you also want to experience some frustration…
Anyone else like to do command chaining with extrude? You know, you can constrain to an axis and do things like rotating or scaling? And this makes use of the pivot setting, so an active element or 3D cursor is the center. And how it’s super cool that you can just do shift-R to repeat the last one? I know I’m one of those oddballs that thinks it’s really useful.
But now try doing that chaining thing with a custom transform. It reverts to normal mode transforms every time after the first step! What the #$%!.. :mad:
No good if you have to keep manually changing the transform menu back to custom for every successive step, and it completely breaks the usefulness of the repeat last step function in this regard.
Put in a bug report, but given the response I got I’m not sure if anything has been done or will be done about it. :no:
