Been working with Blender for about 3 months, and I cannot find an easy way to offset a closed EDGE LOOP. Trying to get all edges offset evenly to the inside or outside of the original edges. I’ve tried extruding and scaling but this give faulty results (see screen dump).
There must be an easier way. Maybe a script?
Any help is really appreciated.
you to give a thickness to your edges?
try in edit mode shift’s that should work
Salutations
Try using Alt-S. This is the Shrink / flatten tool, which basically scales along the normals instead of along Global or Local axis.
OK Here is maybe a better picture of what I am trying to do. Red edge is existing, green edge is what I want to create. In any CAD package worth it’s salt, this is a basic one-click function once you provide the offset distance. Any ideas how to do this in Blender?
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Unfortunately, Blender isn’t a CAD program, nor does it excel at spline based modeling. However, if you alter your workflow a little bit, you can achieve similar results.
The Shrink/Fatten tool is the key to pulling this sort of thing off, but it performs its operations based on face normals, so you can’t use it (AFAIK) on 2-dimensional outlines. First, take your initial shape and Extrude it into a 3-dimensional volume. Then select the entire object, Extrude again, cancel the extrusion and Alt-S to Shrink the faces. Voila!
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in edge mode you extrude then scale then Alt-S and this will scale normal to the edges
no volume ior faces nvovle
SAlutations
Great! Thanks to all that responded…the Alt-S worked perfectly…exactly what I was looking for. Cheers!
Ker-bump!
Spectre-7, you Sir have made my day. I had always thought this was possible but didn’t know how. Some kind soul said Alt+S would do it, but didn’t mention the first extrusion so it behaved differently. I thought what I got was the best I could hope for.
Thank you for this tip so well explained.
there is a script to do it -search for “inset” script
I’m afraid inset script is far to be a good solution.
Simply put it doesn’t work correctly on curved surfaces.
I’m looking for a good inset or offset feature in Blender, actually is one of the things I miss more (alongside a good chamfer tool).
In case someone else comes across this thread, now there is the addon Edit Mesh Tools which has Offset which can be found in the Edges menu when in Edit Mode