wings way is faster…The are other nice tool suggestions on the wiki page that was started foe bmesh tools personally I would take them over booleans
Hmm. Well is suppose Ctrl-F->click is a fraction of a second slower than just Ekey. Fair enough.
I think it’s a fair point. The way extrude region works now isn’t particularly useful on anything beyond relatively flat surfaces. On a cube selecting anything more than a single face before extruding is unlikely to give you the results you really want. It should work how the inset depth works. Then if you want the results extrude does now, you can still get that with inset.
Making it the default would be a terrible idea. Imagine you’re extruding an arm on a character with a round-ish torso. With the inset method the arm would just explode:
The inset method has its uses, certainly, but in a lot of situations the current extrude default is much more useful.
That’s true. Current extrude certainly isn’t useless. How do other apps deal with it? Can Wings extrude the way Blender currently does? Been so long since I used it I’ve forgotten.
Come now, it’s slower and you know it. Are you leaving out the fact that you have to activate the tool, than bring out the F6 panel or go to the tools panel than tweak some settings there before achieving a similar result to the Wings one to make this all appear like the Blender equivalent is just some one button story.
By the time you go to the tools menu or bring up the f6 one I am done if I am doing this in Wings.Tools panel to me kind of sucks it just slows things down.
+1 Blender is very quick for modelling, with all it’s faults. Experienced modellers like shortcut keys. Keep it as fast as possible, with as few extra clicks/searching/opening as possible. The workflow should be as streamlined as can be.
Well to be fair, in current builds you can inset by hitting “i” and hold Ctrl to “extrude” it.
??
Move mouse to control inset, Ctrl-mouse move to control depth. No Tools Panel required since r46695.
Edit: lol, xrg beat me to it. And yeah, Ikey works. I bound it to Ikey myself earlier, didn’t know it’s an official setting now.
Wouldn’t it be better if the extrude was seperated from inset?
I mean, Make it another mode of the extrude tool or something.
Makes a lot more sense to me.
I just wanted to add a big wish to this project:
- Bevel and Inset should be able to solve collisions(at least like in Softimage).
- It would be great if it would be based on something like straight skeleton(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_skeleton) for 2d polygons, but in 3d - that would be awesome, since that would avoid any errors which occur very often with complex geometry. for inset, it might use a 2d version of straight skeleton and use the results for all polygons to merge them and use them for insetting whole 3d patch.
If you want to extrude and inset together, there isn’t an easy way to use a combination of these tools to achieve the same effect. At least I think there isn’t. Not without taking a few extra steps at least. So it’s a good thing they’re together.
Sorry than I am on 2.63a so I didn’t know about this if it is in than I am happy with that. That is what I personally like if I can go into tool modes with the mouse and keyboard good… tool panel is good if you have to be precise and exact but it kills speed when all you are aiming for is “looks good is good”
Hello,
It’s very nice to see modelling getting some much needed polish 
Two big things on my wishlist would be proportional/percentage option for loopcut (as it was in 2.49 and earlier) and a slight improvement how the bevel tool works, so the bevel creates cleaner angles, regardless of adjacent face length.
Isn’t there a rewrite of bevel according to the sketchup plugin going on?
Why improve the current bevel, if the rewrite is on the way?
My inset polygon addon uses the straight skeleton method to solve collisions. If there is time, I might advise Alexander on how he can do this into the C version of Blender’s inset.
To chip in, it felt the first time I saw that not intuitive which I proved myself this week when I needed to do that particularly action.
The mnemonic was not based on logic (because at first I was also in my flow searching for something extrude related) but remembering that I needed to look for something weird/fiddling with the inset tool. And when people do have that feeling, it is mostly because that is a design flaw.
So I do understand what Snakesong is telling. If you didn’t watch that video you will have a hard time to find it out yourself because you will be looking in the wrong place.
It is also not because you familiarized with a certain workaround, that is automatically the correct way to design it.
Well, waddayaknow. I tried a new build, and it´s really nice to have the option. There´s still no excuse for the weird extrude though… and now it should be easy to lift the code from the inset tool. Maybe a shortkey modifier to switch between extrudemodes during extrude(averaged or individual normals), like ALT.
that example that MadMinstrel showed is a good example of where it´s useful, I never said it wasn´t, but to be fair he would still be resizing that arm afterwards, so I don´t really see why that would be such a disaster.
I´ll take some time to elaborate more why I think the current extrude is bad and post it here later. I have some more beef in the mesh modeling section:p
I totally agree with you. To be honest I actually misread your initial post and thought you were saying inset doesn’t work right when you were talking about extrude. I think your second sentence with “I know inset is new” is what threw me off. (hooray for skim reading!)
Maybe alt+s (shrink/flatten) could be changed to work like the extrude on inset does. I’ve never been entirely certain what it’s use case is for. It gets close to the same results, but you almost always have to tweak it a little.
Maybe I am been naive but I think you can get that inset style extrude into the extrude tool by just adding an option of it to displace along individual face normal. I think the problem I am seeing in Snakesong’s first pic is that the displacement takes place on an average normal. In Wings when you extrude and than select normal the displacement is along the individual face normal.