i just finished a 3d head model but i found it a bit more challenging in blender than in my Native Maya. How in the heck do i cut a face, or fill a hole?
is my only option to extrude an edge and merge the verts as i’ve been doing or is there a tool?
Blender does not support Ngons so you can only fill a hole with 4 sides. Use the F key after selecting verts or edges. The knife tool K is one option to cut and other than that there is the ctrl R wich will add loops. Take a look in the manual on face and edge tools:
To work efficiently in Blender I have found the best method is to work with edges and filling quads with the face command and extruding. Over time I have dropped other methods I used to be able to use when being able to edit polygons like you can in other programs. For Blender it seems better and faster to work with edges and plan things that way rather than cutting and splitting ngons. I have had to rethink all my old habits. I am not saying that is right or good. But it is the way it is in Blender and I have simply had to adapt.
Extrude & merge is also how I’ve been filling holes; not sure if there’s a better way.
Cutting a face: try playing around with the knife tool (K key). I find the exact mode with the ctrl key down (snaps the cutting line to vertices) pretty handy.
@richard, i’ve been taught that any polygon w/ more than 4 sides is BAD, tris and quads only. so i try to keep that in my modeling practice.
maybe i’m doing it wrong, i’ve hit the “K” key before but nothing ever happens… do i have to have something selected? like the face, surounding edges verts?
You need some edges selected (and it’ll only cut those ones, even if the pink cutting line crosses other edges) – so most of the time you’ll want to be edge select mode.
Funny that K doesn’t do anything; I think for me with no edges selected, it complains “need some edges to work on”.
BTW: you can combine select modes by hold shift (I just discovered this today) – e.g. if you click the vertices select button and then shift-click the edge select button, now you’re in vertex select and edge select mode at the same time. Also possibly useful for knifing.
Cutting with ‘k’ in 2.5x requires a selection of what you want to cut, then you have to hold ‘k’ down and with the LMB draw the cut. Options for the cut can be found under the tools menu on the left side of the screen on the very bottomwhen you press ‘t’ or in many cases this winodw is already open.
Filling holes in Blender usually requires just hitting the ‘f’ key with objects of 3 to 4 sides, other than that you will probably need to do a extrusion and scale method followed by a merge (alt-m) in some cases, such as the end of a cylinder if you didn’t have a cap ends option turned on.
on the pane toolbar with the options for the 3d window in edit mode look for a magnet and just to the right of that is the “snap to” menu,
set to snap to vertex, but don’t click the magnet, this will then snap to vertices when ctrl is held.