2.37a changes in gus tutorial?

Hello, this is about the fourth time I’m new to Blender. I have trouble with it not acting the way I expect it to, and not being able to do things I think should be simple.

Reading around on this forum, I’ve seen several recommendations for the Gus tutorial (gingerbread man) found here: http://download.blender.org/documentation/htmlI/ch04.html

I decided to give it a try, and noticed that the tutorial states that it is relevant to 2.31. I immediately noticed that the starting condition for Blender is different between the current version 2.37a and the 2.31, as there is no plane , but a cube in the default startup configuration. I think: ‘No big deal, I can handle that.’

The next page then tells me to subdivide the cube (I used the default cube present at startup, edit mode, vertices already all highlighted, then Subdivide), and then remove the left side of it by BKEY selecting the left line of vertices and doing an XKEY | Vertices. The problem is that, for me, doing so only seems to remove one of the three vertices.

I was a little concerned that my copy of the program isn’t working like the tutorial, but I pressed on… I did the BKEY, XKEY procedure again to get rid of the other two, and then proceded with the extrude steps in the tutorial. When I got to the part where I set the SubSurf stuff, I noticed that Gus’s limbs were only 2 dimensional (while his body and head were still 3 dimensional).

Now I’m a bit of an idiot when it comes to Blender… as evidenced by whenever I try to do things the way it seems like it should work, it fails or behaves very oddly. So I was trying to follow the tutorial to the letter, without improvisation (if at all possible) or adjusting it to what seems right to me.

Did I miss a step or caveat or execute the tutorial wrong? Or does the tutorial no longer work if followed literally in 2.37a? If so, what concepts should I be thinking of to complete the tutorial succesfully?

Many thanks…

Your problem is with the small button with a cube on it at the bottom of the 3d view, next to the buttons with four dots, a line, and a triangle. These are only seen in edit mode. It will be pressed, this means that the vertices that are hidden by other vertices will not be selected.
Deselect this button, and the tutorial should work fine.

Aha!

Many thanks! Is there someone I could contact in order to suggest a change to that tutorial to include that tidbit? I didn’t see any such contact info. in the tutorial…

edit: I’d be willing to email an editted .html file to whomever, I guess, as an example of what my suggestion would be. Thanks.