how do you Cut out part of faces in Blender?

Freak

What is the best was to cut into part of a faces in Blender. Eg to cut out windows. I have not been able to find a tut that has been helpful in this, and at a loss. Any help will be most welcome.

Thanks in Advance Freak

Sphynx

The first question to ask is whether you are cutting out pieces from a flat face or a curve. While the principle is the same, there are slightly different approaches based upon curvature.

One of the simplest solutions is to separate off the colliding pieces into two new separate objects, boolean them together, tidy them, then rejoin them to the main piece. (please, no silly quotes from other people about how Blender booleans stink - it's an old argument . Just get over it, and use them properly instead of expecting it to do all the work for you).

Personally, I do a lot of this manually using the knife tools / scripts rather than rely on the boolean system as I like more control, but at the end of the day you are going to have to break each interacting polygon up into multiple pieces. You can reassemble them for visual display reasons later into f-gons.

My view is to not think of the polygons being important - you can always assemble a polygon by selecting a load of points and hitting [f]. My view is that its the vertices that are important - get them - by whatever method, knives, booleans, whatever, and the rest is easy.

One particular point in regards to the curves - go with the flow. If you cut a circle out of a curve made up of squares then try to link the corners to the circle using triangles, you'll get a messy curved surface. Make sure that the new polygons that fill the gaps follow the same curve as the rest of the mesh.

If there's anything that you can't visualise here, shout - I'm not in a position to put together example images at present but I can later if need be.

Freak

Thanks Sphynx, I can alway count on you. :thumb:
I'll let you know if I need any more help.

Sphynx

Actually, I've got ten or fifteen minutes so I'm going to go through one of the Faint Hearted tutorials that were not published and cut out the windows and portals section. I'll need to do new graphics for it, but it should be up before the end of today.

Freak

Thanks for the heads up, I take a look at it when you post it up.