New to Blender, halp!

Support Modeling
1

I’m trying to model a column/pillar type thing and I made a knife cut in it (the edges selected).

http://i773.photobucket.com/albums/yy17/SpecsShirts/BUH.jpg
BUH.jpg1024×576

How would I go about duplicating this knife cut perfectly on each side so I can extrude them inwards to make it appear more column-like? Or is there a more efficient way to do this perhaps?

Hopefully I’m being clear enough, thanks in advance guys

2

You current have 12 faces around your column. If you want them all to be identical then one way would be to delete all the geometry except for the face that you have modified. Then use the “spin” tool to regenerate all the other faces.

3

You dont have to use knife tool. Select all faces u want to extrude, press Alt+e and 2 right after to take individual faces option, then RMB to accept and I to insert faces. Under the operators menu( bottom of tool bar press T to open/close) u will get options do extrude in/out and scale new faces.

4

hmm, tried it and this is what I got. The knife cuts didn’t carry over for some reason.

http://i773.photobucket.com/albums/yy17/SpecsShirts/guh.jpg
guh.jpg1024×576

5

column.png1280×946 55.2 KB

From top left:

  • A cylinder, 12 vertices, no cap
  • Inset face
  • Extrude face in
  • 3 loop cuts, scaled along z
  • Delete rest of the cylinder
  • Spin tool, 360°, 12 steps, dupli, select all, remove doubles
  • Base extruded
  • Base additional loop cuts
  • Subdivision surface modifier, shading smooth, some edge loops have edge creasing set to 1.
6

Thanks for all the responses! Followed your guys instructions, specifically JA12’s and ran into a small problem.

http://i773.photobucket.com/albums/yy17/SpecsShirts/help3.jpg
help3.jpg1024×576

After I sub surface smoothed it I got this weird little seam here as well as another one in the back. Any idea on how to get rid of this? I removed doubles and all that.

7

This is done by subsurf. Mark that edge press shift + e and make crease 1 (full violet, can be done in transform menu as well -top of bar u get after presing N) this will tell blender that u dont want those round edges here.

8

Those kind of imperfections go well with that object :smiley: (Yeah, maybe you want them to be intentional)

Deformation like that usually means there’s something wrong with the topology itself, like unmerged geometry or inside faces. Remove doubles has a merge distance property and with the default value it doesn’t merge vertices that are apart of each other.

If you can’t find the problem, upload your .blend file to http://www.pasteall.org/blend/ and share the link. It’s way easier to look at the model than trying to analyze screenshots.