I’m wondering how the heck do I join these three highlighted surfaces into one? If I use w4, it creates a mess of it by destroying all the vertexes/edges/faces. I just want all three of those faces to become one face.
Blender only supports triangles and quads. What you are trying to do would create a face from seven verts. You can fake it with an fgon which hides the interior edges.
Even with apps like maya which support ngons everything is eventually broken down to triangles for rendering or a game engine. The ngons just make the meshes cleaner and easier to work with since the knife and other editing tools in maya understand them. If you subsurf a maya 5 sided ngon you get similar artifacts as you would get with a quad and connected triangle in blender.
How do I make Blender understand/translate the rest of that model so I can actually see the surfaces? I joined a bunch of planes to make it, but only a few survived intact.
Thanks fer all yer help so far, I really appreciate it!
Addendum: Uh-oh. Should I have used extrude on all the planes that I used? I just split lines and moved vertices around.
I realised some time ago that if it can create faces, it removes the ones selected and creates new ones in their place (so no need to remove the selected faces before F-ing)