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Exciting Extruding
There's 6 different Extrude tools in Blender. Learn what they all do.
Samuel Sullins
February 06, 2023
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Stole this right out of the Blender Manual. It's OK since I'm using for educational purposes, right?
Extruding is the #1 best editing tool.
We're all using Extrude, all the time. You can't make a model without it.
The ordinary, normal way to extrude is to TAB into Edit Mode, select anything (edges, face, or vertices) and press E to extrude it with the Extrude tool.
The Extrude tool then uses 1 of 3 modes:
Extrude Faces
Extrude Edges
Extrude Vertices
You can constrain your extrusion to any axis by pressing X, or Y, or Z, or ZZ or XX or YY for local axes.
What're local axes, you ask?
Have a read ↓
The Secret Of Advanced Axes
First, "axes" doesn't mean a bunch of these -> 🪓. It's the plural version of "axis."In Blender, you can constrain most tools (such as the Move tool) along a particular axis. You press X or Y or Z, and the Move tool only moves the object along that axis.
But you can do a lot more than that.
Pressing SHIFT + X will move it along any axis but not X. SHIFT + Y and SHIFT + Z will do the same thing for the Y and Z axes.
There's more you can do, too.
Press XX or YY or ZZ to use Local Axes. Local axes depend on the orientation of the selected object or face. They're that object's very own X, Y, and Z directions.
This is amazing when you need to extrude something straight outward from a face—press E and then ZZ and it'll work! (Sometimes this happens by default with extruding, but I can never tell when.)
Try these tricks on Move and Rotate and Scale—they all work wonders.
The other very very important thing to remember is that right-clicking during an Extrude operation does NOT cancel it. It simply resets the position of the newly extruded faces, leaving you with double faces on your mesh.
This is bad. To properly cancel an extrusion, right-click then press Ctrl + Z to undo the whole thing. This doesn't leave any doubles behind.
(If you do have double face you need to fix, select everything and then press M and pick Merge By Distance to merge any vertices that are very close together. This usually solves the doubles problem.)
There are 3 more extrusion modes, though. There's even a convenient pop-up to get to them all. Press Alt (or Option) + E to open it.
This menu gives you 3 new options:
Extrude Faces Along Normals
Extrude Individual Faces
Extrude Manifold
It also shows the Spin tool and the Repeat Extrude tool. (I'm not going over those here—the Spin tool needs its own post. And the Repeat Extrude tool is easy to use, give it a try!)
The first new one, Extrude Faces Along Normals, does exactly what is says it does—it extrudes the selected faces along their normals. This is useful when working with any angled faces (so all the time.)
You can get very similar results without using it, though. Just extrude some faces, then right-click to leave the new faces in the exact same place as the old ones (generally a very bad idea, because those faces are double now.)
As long as you didn't deselect the new faces, you can now press Alt (or Option) + S to scale them along their normals, moving them outward or inward.
Extrude Individual Faces does almost exactly the same thing. But if you have multiple faces selected, they will be extruded separately, NOT as one big chunk.
Try this on a sphere. It's cool.
The last one, Extrude Manifold, is the one in the image at the top. It lets you extrude faces in ways that would not work at all, and then it fixes the geometry for you.
It does make ngons a lot, but I absolutely love it. It's a lifesaver for tasks like inset bits and holes.
Have fun extruding!
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