Hi everyone, I’m a max user trying to switch to blender. Iv’e been reading tutorials on modeling with blender but simple things like cutting a polygon is not working for me. Everytime I try to cut a polygon it adds 4 edges to unselected polys. Why is this? This program has potential but damn! Usability is unnecessarily complicating! I would appreciate if anyone could explain how to…“I’m ashamed”… Cut a poly! :x
That is the problem with Blender. The UI is a little hard to use.
For straight lines you could use loop cut. I still have a hard time with cutting.
Hi Jep.
As a former student and user of Max, I can empathise with what you’re saying about the modelling tools within Blender.
I’ll start by blatantly saying that in my opinion Blender’s modelling tools aren’t that terrific. They can be used to great effect and the old addage of “a bad workman blames his tools” may crop up at some point.
However, when I used Max for studies I never modelled in it. My modelling has always been done in Wings3D as it’s polygon tools are brilliant. But that’s just me.
As I don’t know what other applications you’ve looked at for the modelling side of your CG creativity I can’t really comment. But it seems your gripes to begin with are purely based on modelling tools which is positive.
You’ve narrowed down a specific area that is bothering you instead of just walzing in here and bitching about Blender as a whole.
Do try to be patient with Blender and it’s workflow. It IS offputting to begin with, there’s no doubt about that. But with patience you’ll find a very sublime and pleasant tool within Blender.
Give Wings3D a shot if you want a good modelling tool. Granted it’s volume-based and prefers closed meshes from a box-modelling point of view, but hey, it AND Blender cost nothing compared to $$$$ for Max.
Post your progress and let us know how you get on. 
I hope I understand you properly, you say <Everytime I try to cut a polygon it adds 4 edges to unselected polys. Why is this?> Is it not correct that a cut face gains two extra vertices so any poly’ sharing that edge also gains the extra vertex. The unselected face needs to handle the change. Blender is doing what is right and proper methinks 
…“a bad workman blames his tools”…
As long as I have used Blender, I have never used the cutting tool, other than to see what it does. You can probably manage not using it at all. A little foresight and planning can avoid using that cutting tool.
Like mugwah said, Blender is properly creating the vertices, in order to maintain the structure of the mesh, without leaving any holes or non- 4-sided faces (sometimes 3-sided faces).
i ve started to use blender in the last november, i can tell you that in the beggining i was a bit(for not to say a lot) confused about blender workflow, this cut thing in blender is a bit tricky, it works pretty well, i prefer to use the middle cut to keep the vertex simmetry, you have to select the desired vertices that you want to get cut and do the lines, before it you have to know where you are cutting, if you going to organic is probably that you will want all quad, so you have to cut in the right place, if you dont understand this there is a good tut that i followed that lightened my ideas about cutting:
http://jlp.nerim.net/tutorials/hands-modelling/hands-tuto-01.html
Blender supports only faces that have exactly 3 or 4 edges, so if you cut an edge it creates new edges to keep triangles or quads.
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I didn’t imply Jep was a bad workman, I just said there was a likelyhood someone might turn round and say what often gets said in these kinds of posts:
Which is that often an artist may blame a program’s lack of specific tools (which they find in other apps) for producing poor results.
It gets said quite a bit in various forums including Elysiun, and often by new folk trying to approach Blender or virtually any new piece of software they are trying to use.
I was merely preparing Jep for what folk might say in response to his/her question. 
[quote=“PolygoneUK”][quote=“Spin”]…“a bad workman blames his tools”…
On a lighter note…a good workman know the quailty of his tools…
The truth is that the best workmen will produce poor results with poor tools. But Blender is not a poor tool for the job it was designed for. It is a misunderstood tool.
Jeb is obviously trying to understand it… that points to he is probebly a good workman.
Why is blender so …eeehm “com_pli_ca_ted”: it’s because originally Blender was an internal tool inside a company, co-workers were trained and willing to learn it, and helped each other out while getting what they needed specifically from the programmer(s). It wasn’t designed to be “easy to use” but to produce “fast and good results”. It’s a lot of learning in the beginning, but once you’ve gotten good at it, it’ll come naturally.
Once you’ve had the “ah-HAH!” moment it’ll get better.
Welcome JepMasterAce.
i dont see whats so hard about blender, everything is properly labled… if you ask me better than wings3d… but hey your choices are (1)go to a new software, (2)live with the way blender is or (3) help out the coding of the next version of blender.
have a nice day
(and yes i know blender is far from perfect)
Wow, alot of responses! Thanks Guys. I really still don’t understand how cutting polygons work in blender. I’m sorry. I’m used to 3ds max and maya’s way of simply "selecting the cut tool, clicking on one edge or vertex then clicking another edge or vertex to make a cut. The reason I’m switching from 3ds max to blender is because not everyone on my site can afford 3ds max. So I’m writing a tutorial series for blender as I learn based on game development. I already understand all concepts of 3d. As someone mentioned, “you could posibly get away without cutting”, I find that very hard to believe. I know how to use the loop tool already but I’m just trying to cut one polygon and not have 2 V’s on unselected poly’s. I’ve been trying for days! Thanks for all the replys though.
Ok, to finish this thread of with a classical link to the wiki … here we go
This…
http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/PartII/Edge_and_Face_Tools#Knife_Tool.2FCut_Type
…and maybe this…
http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/PartII/Edge_and_Face_Tools#Face_Loop_Splitting
…as well.
And as mentioned above the ‘unwanted’ edges are needed by blender since it only supprots 3 and 4-sided polygons. So you will often be better of using the loop-splitting (= creating edgeloops)
Have fun and good luck on learning blender,
Werner
Ahhhhhhhh! That’s really the thread ender 8) . Blender’s Weird! but i’ll learn it and make it another one of my invisible tool! Thanks for the links Hoehrer!
