I’ve only just recently gotten my hands on this amazing FREE program which I was totally psyched about… seeing as it’s so awesome… and FREE!! Anyways, I’m just doing simple stuff, reading tutorial and watching videos to get the hang of things. There was one thing I was wondering how to do… which I cant seem to figure out: How can I add edges within faces, stretching from one side to the other.
For example, I have the cube that the program always starts off with… I did some extrustions and manipulations… but all the faces are still squares. I want to add an edge along the center of the face so I can pull that part up and change the shape. How can I do this?
If I’m not being specific enough… just tell me and I’ll try and explain it better.
You can : 1) select the face you want to divide, hit W and select Subdivide, or 2) select a edge of the face and hit K and select from the various knife tool options or just select the first option “loopcut” (there is also a separate hotkey for this I think it’s Ctrl-L) … there are others methods too but the above two are the ones I use most . But you should remember that currently Blender does not support N-gons (polygons with more then four sides) so if you only select a face and subdivide it Blender will add additional edges to make the cut internally “logical” . I usually stick with loop cuts so that I don’t get triangular faces . You should read Toontje’s thread on “Loops and Poles” . He shows good advanced methods on working with geometry .
Thanks a bunch… I’ll definately look into that stuff.
edit* Is there anyway to straighten something out? Like…after I cut up that cube into a bunch of peices and rearranged them, if I look from an above view they’re all outta wack. Any way I can straighten this up… or do I have to go in peice by peice?
edit edit* I found the snap to grid… but my grids too big so it just fattens up and screws up my thing… any way to break up the grid?
(Gah…I’m sorry. If I’m out of bounds here just tell me. I know some forums don’t like double posting… and I figure I might as well not clutter up the forums with little threads when I could just answer my questions here.)
edit 1) A neat trick is to select the faces you want to line up, hit S (to scale) then hit one of the axes X,Y or Z then zero - depending on how the faces are oriented, but usually you want to select the one that is oriented along the face normal, i.e. the axis that is “sticking out” perpendicular from the face . This will align the selected faces together to a level plane . But this works only along global axes so is somewhat limited .
Another option is to use the “Smooth” function available through the W - Specials menu or under the Mesh Tools panel in F9 (Editing) in mesh Edit Mode . You might have to hit it a few times to get the desired effect .
edit 2) from the 3D window header -> View -> View Properties -> under Grid: you can change the grid resolution etc …
Also if you hold down Ctrl while transforming (move/rotate/scale) your selected object/ vertices etc will snap to grid during the operation . Also you can toggle on auto grid snapping from the User Preferences . Just drag down the User Preferences header and select “View & Controls” there you will find the “Snap to grid :” options for move/rotate/scale .
