I’ve tried to do some research into this but I can’t seem to find what I was hoping should be a quick and easy solution.
Basically, I’m creating a mesh where I want to extrude the edges out evenly in the direction that I would assume the normals are facing. From a default cube, Maya’s behavior is expected and provides the desired outcome. Blender however, seems to extrude the edges in other directions. This was achieved in Blender using the extrude along normals option.
Surely I should be able to replicate this in Blender very easily? I’ve seen workarounds but some are quite long winded. For example, extruding the faces and deleting unwanted geometry. Am I missing something obvious, or does Blender not work this way?
Select the edge. Press E for extrusion, then press ENTER key. This creates the connected edge, with ZERO offset (at this point, you’ll see no visual difference). Then press S for scale, scale it out.
Maya seems to decide for you that you want the normal of the side face. (not the “normal of the edge”)
Blender considers the normal of the edge the average/midpoint of the normals of the two faces that it is attached to (it does not arbitrarily decide for you one of the faces)
Thanks for all the replies. I’ll retry the suggested tools addon. I thought I did yesterday but might have tried the wrong thing.
Unfortunately, using scale only works when it’s a more of a symmetrical shape. For example, doing it on a capsule skews some of the directions of the edges so they aren’t straight.
