Hi, I think this is the right place to post this, but if it isn’t, I’m sorry.
I’m going through the tutorial on Wikibooks (I can’t link because of my post count), and I’m having a bit of a problem with making the simple person. I modeled the person, but then when I subsurf the mesh, the legs end up weird. I can’t explain it, so I’ll just attach the .blend file.
Does anyone have any idea what I’m doing wrong here? I’m pretty sure I followed the tutorial exactly, I even retried several times.
The first problem, which makes one leg look like it is made of bubbles, is caused by those interior faces I’ve highlighted. You can get rid of them using X>>Faces Only
It looks better, but if you look at the back, there’s still some pinching. After switching to vertex select mode I notice that the pinched edges are highlighted, while the ok edges are not. Looking at the vertex count in the info header (top of the screen on the right) I notice there are 24 vertices selected, there should only be 16 (count em.) There are doubles.
Select all, and remove doubles (W>>Remove Doubles) and 20 excess vertexes are removed.
It’s looking better, but you’ve still got those ugly black creases in the mesh. This is a normals problem, very common, and easily righted by Ctrl+n (calculate normals outside.)
Now the question is: how do you prevent that from happening? As to the normals situation, there’s not too much you can do except recognize it when it happens, and do the fix (Ctrl+n). The doubles and interior faces is a modeling problem, and generally happens because extrude doesn’t look like it’s doing much, so beginners often press it twice, thus getting doubled verts.
I think the interior faces thing happened because when I use Extrude, it seems to have a set path. I can’t move it in any way I want, I can only move it along a line that appears. I have to click MMB to be able to move it in any way I want. Do you think this could be the problem? If so, how do I avoid it?
I see the problem my man.
First delete the subsurf mod on the mesh, then in edit mode, with “Faces” as your selection mode, hit the z key, and then in side the leg you have faces that need to be removed. Give that a try.
After that you may need to hit “A” once of twice to select all the verts, and hit “Control N” to recalculate normals to the out side.
Blender assumes you want to extrude along the normal. If you are extruding faces from cubes, this is exactly what you want to do. If the normal is pointing off in some wonky direction (that’s a technical term, means Not Normal) then you have too many verts selected (probably because of some doubles) and that problem should be fixed before moving on.
Generally, to extrude in an arbitrary direction, type escape immediately after typing e to extrude, then type g and move the mouse or g, x or y or z to move along an axis.
It’s really impossible to say just what went wrong without looking over your shoulder as you’re modeling. With some more experience, you’ll find out what happened. From looking over other people’s shoulders while they were modeling, I’ve noticed typing e twice to be a common problem. With the doubles in your mesh, I suspect that happened to you, too. I’ve never encountered a problem with the middle mouse button, because the people I was watching used Macs, which doesn’t have a middle mouse button.