Is there any way to cut a mesh and separate it at the cut edge?
Lets say we have a simple cube. We use the knife tool (SHIFT-B) and place a cut somwhere on the cube.
If we finish the cut we only see new edges where the cut is, but I need the two separated pieces of the cube.
Of course I can select all vertices of one side / half of the cube and use separate, but my mesh is much more complicated. The cut edge and original vertices are very close together so difficult to select the right vertices for separation.
I just need the knife tool really cut any mesh object into two separated meshes - how can I do that?
(I am in Blender 2.67b)
The knife won’t do it by itself… but Blender can do what you want very easily.
After the cut with the knife, switch to Face mode and select the part you want to separate. Press [P] -> Separate by Selection.
It will create a new object from the selection. No need to separate the vertices first, it’s done automatically because of the switch to Face mode. (Note that if you stay in Vertex or Edge mode, the faces with be destroyed on one side of the cut.)
Hi Kaluura and Small Troll,
thanks for your reply but what you wrote does not work, therefore I started this thread here.
After cutting the cube using the knife tool (SHIFT-B) all vertices of the cube including the additional ones caused by the cutting process are still linked. So if I select one vertex and then hit CTRL-L all vertices of the cube are selected and not only those belonging to one side of the cut. Exactly this is my problem. The knife tool does not cut the cube it just adds new vertices / edges along the cut path.
Switching to face mode is also no option for me since my real object has thousands of vertices and faces. Some vertices are very close together (only a few pixels even in zoomed view) and some faces are very small nearly unselectable manually.
Is there any possibility to do a real cut which separates into 2 meshes automatically?
Or is there a tool like ‘cut and at selected edges’ which results in two unlinked meshes which I can separate?
Hi, I found the way by myself. If you know it, it is very easy.
In edit mode you select all vertices.
Then hit SHIFT-K to start the knife tool, just do a cut on the cube wherever you want to cut it into two pieces.
Then hit SPACE, this executes the cut and keeps all edges of the cut selected.
And now the magic, hit V (the rip tool) and immediately after pressing V hit ENTER.
Now the mesh is really cut. So you can now select one vertex of one half of the cube hit CTRL-L to select all linked vertices and voila - only the vertices of the one half are selected and you can do whatever you like with it.
Oh my goodness, you saved my life!! How can it be so difficoult to do something so useful in Blender?? I mean it shout be included in the knife tool options, not to make such a bunch of steps to get something that for people who is moddeling organic shapes is very a very interesting feature. Thank you so much. I know that this thread is old but yeaah, it is amazing to have this usefull information for people like me hehe.
