I’M using blender 2.33a.
Is there a to extrude or move vertices along the normal of a certain face?
Or can I adjust the local XYZ axes to fit the normal of a face?
Alt-S to scale along normals.
Martin
What exactly are normals? I have head a lot about them, but I have no idea what they are.
Each face of a mesh possesses a normal that is perpendicular from its center…Normals define a surface’s direction. They are used by blender to make rendering and modeling decisions…
If you kind of want to see what they are. Make a mesh, enter edit mode, and in the edit buttons, toggle draw normals down. This draws little blue lines out of every face. These are the face normals. Basically, it is the direction the face is pointing. It is how Blender calculates how light bounces off, and that sort of thing. So scaling along the normals would just basically scale the faces out in the direction that they are pointing. Make sense? 
I’m not sure I understand why when anyone asks if you can extrude along a normal of face, that people reply by saying Alt-S is scale along normal.
I understand that scaling along a normal does mean you are extruding along a normal. But you are also scaling which isn’t necessarily what everyone wants is it? Having said that I’m glad that people suggested it because I hadn’t realised it existed before that and it is pretty handy.
There are a couple of python scripts that can extrude along the normal. One is called Tesselate and another is called Extrude along normal.
tesselate:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16777&highlight=tesselate
extrude along normal:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15948&highlight=extrude
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Caleb
A ‘normal’ is a line perpendicular to the face which points toward the ‘front.’