Cre@teOnline - The Web Designer's Bible CH04 Page 18
Face Operations
Just like vertices and edges, transforms and editing can be done at the face
level as well. Often, modelers will work at the face level to select and delete
unneeded sections of mesh--like sections that end up inside or butted
against other mesh--to lower a model's polygon count.
Face divide works just like edge divide, except that the user can select a
point anywhere inside the polygon as the point for the new vertex to
appear (see Figure 4.15).
3 D G
R A P H I C S
& A
N I M A T I O N
164
F
IGURE
4.15
Face divide: (a) The unal-
tered triangular polygon.
(b) Face divide adds a
new vertex at whatever
point inside the face that
the user selects. The exist-
ing face is divided into
three faces, all connected
to the new vertex.
(a)
(b)
Another useful tool is face extrusion, a process that takes a selected face (or
faces) and extrudes it in or out from its current position (see Figure 4.16).
The true value of face extrusion may not be immediately obvious, but it
has a number of uses. First of all, it enables you to create additional surface
details with the faces of an existing object, which can quickly result in
effects that would take quite a bit of work to generate otherwise. Note that
after you've extruded a face, you can extrude it again to create another
step, or extrude some of the new faces that were created in the process.
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