In the image, I would like to alter the lower mesh to look like the upper. All I’ve been able to work out is to use the Knife, cut a polygon into two, drag and snap the new points to where the edge should be, W Remove Doubles, repeat for the other polygon, tris to quad on the result. That’s way too many clicks, surely there’s a faster way?
Not a lot faster or easier, but maybe a bit.
Select top edge and right edge, subdivide. This creates some triangles.
Move new horizontal vertex in place and then new vertical vertex.
Select all, convert tris to quad.
Oops misread…For posterity, here’s how to go from top right to bottom:
in point mode select top middle point, shift select right middle point then shift select top right corner… hit the m key (merge) and select “at last” (there are many ways to trigger the merge command!)
Another way would be to set snap type to vertex (in the dropdown in 3d view header) and turn on “automerge editing” from the menu in teh 3d view header… snap the extra vertices to the corner and they’ll be automatically merged as you go…
you could even mess around with rotating the edges til they go to the corner (but that way you’ll end up with slivers of polygons on teh outer edges that’ll need cleanup…
you could triangulate the corner face
To go from bottom left to top right:
Hmm… again a few ways… nothing quick… but not really complicated…
This one will take a while to explain but it’s quicker and easier than it sounds…
select teh outer two edges and hit “w” key (for specials menu) and select “subdivide”…
select the corner two triangles and hit “f” to eliminate the middle edge (or indeed run “tris to quads”)
Then “slide” the vertices along the edges to make the corner square… (there’s an addon for vertex slide (which I never use) or you can set the “action centre” from the 3d header to “active element” and eyeball it by selecting the outer edge new vertex and then the corner one and then scaling…
you could set the transform orientation to the edge and scale or translate using the manipulator…
sounds convoluted, but if you’re already in that mode it’s dead quick…
the filleted corner is easy… adding a corner square… not so much!
I’d be tempted to start with the corner squares and extrude edges out from it in the firts place… or select opposing edges and hit “f” to make a quad between…
Thanks to both, many useful points there. I completely forgot about the active pivot, I now prefer it to vertex sliding. The ultimate lesson I think is to be careful to only create edge loop corners where you know you want them, the cross hatch is easier to convert.
I hope a scripter out there will tackle this: allow the user to select a point on a polygon, let him suggest with mouse movement the direction of the cut from the point across the poly, on Enter or click, cut. It is surprising such a simple thing isn’t available in Blender already, given how useful it would be.