Extrude along normal - normal changes

Support Basics & Interface
1

This is something that has haunted me in Blender for a while now and I figure it’s something simple.

http://i.imgur.com/cHQlDfg.png
cHQlDfg.png706×358

In the left pick I’ve grabbed a ring and want to extrude. I’ve set my transform orientation to ‘normal’ at the bottom of the 3d view window, and the 3d cursor is showing me the desired direction. As soon as I actually press ‘E’ to extrude, the normal changes to what is shown in the right hand image.

How do I extrude along the Z in the picture?

2

Fill it with a face first. The vertex normals are all over the place with the 0 area faces.

It’s more mysterious to me that it doesn’t know to get the normal direction right with perfectly aligned vertices

Blender_002.png1716×872 41.7 KB


scaling the vertices up or down even slightly and then it knows to align to the average of those normals. Might be worth reporting this on the tracker and see what they think of it, there certainly has been similar issues before https://developer.blender.org/T38592 but didn’t find a matching report.

3

Thanks that did it