Co-planer issues

Support Modeling
#1

Disclaimer: Please excuse this very basic question as I have only used Blender for a total of 2 days. I performed a brief search and could not find an answer.

I am attempting to make a model starting with a box and then extruding out from there. So far all is well. I am worried, however that I am creating faces that are not co-planer and therefore won’t render correctly later on.

So my question is this: Are the faces really composed of two triangles and therefore I don’t have to worry about whether the vertices composing the face are co-planer or are they actual quads (I believe that is the correct term) and therefore I have to be very careful about how I push the verts?

Assuming I have to worry about whether they are co-planer, is there an easy way to see where I have troubles as well as a relatively simple fix?

Thanks very much.

#2

showing a pic is worth a thousand words

and would allow to see if you have the widget
are you in global mode ?

even if you don’t have it you can always key in X Y or Z to follow this direction

there is a lot of different situations so it hard to know where your are right now!

Salutaitons

#3

I believe my question is more basic than you think it is. I’m not asking whether I’ve made a model with non co-planer faces. I’m asking a question about how Blender handles the faces.
Restated a different way, if I take the box that blender defaults to and move only one vert out of eight, am I going to see rendering artifacts due to the fact that I’ve moved a vert out of the plane of a face or does Blender internally deal with faces as if they are two triangles?

Thanks again

#4

AFAIK at render time, all faces are broken into triangles, so you should be okay. If you want to reset a face so that all verts are on the same plane, you can select all four verts, press S to scale, press X,Y,or Z to select the axis, and then press 0 and enter. This will scale all the verts to the same plane on the axis you selected.

#5

Thanks. It looks like I was worrying for nothing.