Merging Vertices

So, I’m just getting started with Blender after a long and painful career with Maya. I’ve got some old habits that are dying hard.

For example, is there a way in blender to select a vertex and snap it to another quickly and easily? I’ve tried selecting my destination vertext, Shift+S, snap cursor to selection, select target vertex, Shift+S, Snap to Cursor. The unfortunate side effect of this operation is that while the vertex behaves as though it’s merged while I’m moving it around, a simple numeric translation later it’s devorced from the destination vertex.

The other thing I tried for the above is -> Select destination vertex, Shift+S, Snap Cursor to Selection, Holding Shift - Select Target Vertex, Alt+M, At Cursor. This seems to work, but it’s still an awful lot of menu work for something I could do in Maya with -> Hold down V, drag vertex to destination, lasso both vertices, Merge Vertices.

Is there a way to lasso a group of vertices that are very close together, to merge them? Alt+M works well enough when I want to merge the ones I’ve got selected, but to use it I have to pick each vertex individually. Sometimes, they end up too close together for convenient independant selection. If I’m using the “Merge at cursor” option above, this isn’t as much of an issue, but still can be a bummer.

Any hints to help me either satiate or cure my old Maya habits?

Well, I do believe that you have covered all the bases; so I would say NO, there isn’t an easier way, but I read somewhere that version 2.42 will have new merging tools (something like “merge at first selected”, “merge at last selected”, etc)

Hmm, alright. I think with a little more use, the whole set cursor, merge to cursor thing will probably become rote.

How about the selecting whole areas of vertices, using a lasso or dragging a box around them? Possible?

I found the “B” hotkey for selecting faces whose borders can be found within just such a dragged bounding box. Is there something similar for vertices?

Take a look here for selection methods.
http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/PartII/Selection

The b key works in face. edge and vertex mode. Pressing the b key twice gives a circular selection that you can resize with the scroll wheel.

ctrl -> left mouse button -> drag does a lasso select.

GreyBeard

Gasp! Mediawiki.blender.org!? Hooray for reference!

Thanks everyone for the help. Now, if I can just figure out where “turn edge” is hidden…

Edit: Aha! Edge Rotation, in the Ctrl+E menu. Neat! This is getting better by the minute.

this build have the merge tools and other stuff download and try it, he also had viewport rendering in a couple previous builds but stopped it, have the idea why
http://www.blender3d.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8435&sid=39ec6db68fe956c1094275031ff2e684

I tried installing the build above, but for some reason the executable is crashing at startup with a complaint about not having pthreadGC2.dll.

http://schnellweb.ca/antimatter/upload/pthreadGC2.dll

That did it. Thanks Dschnell289!

The added merging tools are perfect.