What’s the most efficient way to fill-in a large area of missing faces when modeling? Selecting only 3 or 4 vertices at a time, then hitting F, can get tiresome. Essentially, how does one best fill-in a hole?
To make it a little easier, switch to edge select mode (Ctrl Tab brings up a pop up menu, there are also some buttons on the 3d window header way over to the right.) Then you only have to select two edges instead of 3 or 4 vertices.
There is a python script called Bridge Faces/Edge-Loops stored away in Mesh>>Scripts menu, which might help. It works on two separate and selected edge loops with the same number of edges in each loop. I’m not sure how much use it will be filling in a hole. It was designed to fill in faces between an interior and exterior wall surface when a hole was cut for a window or door. It basically lines the edge of the hole with new faces, but doesn’t fill in the hole itself.
thanks for the reply…another question: is there a way to align any newly added faces along the same plane? Sometimes added faces get distorted and are “tilted” out of the intended plane they are supposed to lie within. Can their faces all be selected and made to lie “flat” with respect to each other?
Yes . In Editing Mode under mesh tools there is button “smooth” or press W and it’s also in the context menu . It is relative process and it averages the location of the selected face/edge/vert to its neighbors in small increments and it seems somewhat related in function to the “To Sphere” tool . So it won’t make a geometrically “flat” plane -it is best for smoothing curved surfaces … There might be a script for making it flat on a single plane but I don’t use scripts much right now …
You might want to practice with it some before you save your work - if you close Blender and reload you cannot change what you did with “smooth” (from a guy who found out the hard way)
You can make selected vertices perfectly flat with respect to an axis with the scale tool. Select the vertices, then s then x (or y or z), then zero. The vertices will snap to the average distance along the chosen axis. If you want to snap to a plane that isn’t along an axis, a work-around is to rotate the entire model so the faces ARE along an axis, do the flatten operation, then rotate the model back to its original position.
Cool stuff…thanks
Just so this thread is complete 
The way with the bridge script is still missing there, but that’ll come soon i hope.
Werner
Wow, Hoehrer, that’s a wonderful addition. Very complete. Did you write it? Yes, yes, of course you did. 
It’s great. It’s not a tutorial, though, it’s the kind of thing that really belongs in the user’s manual, which, IMHO should be directions for how to DO things, instead of a listing of how the tools work.
Yes, i wrote this some time ago because it was one of the high-FAQs in this forum - thanks for the praise. And no it isn’t really a tutorial - which is stated in the small note in the beginning ;).
The separation of the reference (listing of tool-options) and how-do-i-actually-work manual is one of the things where the manual needs some major overhaul (in a lot of places this has already been started/finished).
But it is far from complete right now. There are still some tweaks and additions (see the bottom) needed. IMO the content of this page should be moved in somewhere between (or after) Manual/Basic Mesh Tools and [Manual/Edge and Face Tools](http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Edge and Face Tools).
I would love to hear suggestions about this instructions on the talk page of the ‘tutorial’.
Werner
Werner, you are so modest. jeez. we need about 20 more users like you, willing to work on the wiki and get all this really really useful stuff down and shared. Actually, I’d take 2 and we could bang this puppy out in no time.
ps -if you have time, comment on my ? regarding 2.43 update on the manual talk page. thx. I really am lost as to how to proceed in a coherent manner.