Extrude! That is a mighty big word for a baby. My vocabulary is growing, and I learn big new words every day. Sometimes I must go to the Blender dictionary to find its meaning.
Dictionaries are filled with so many words. I do not want to spend the time looking up the meaning. I sneak in a question to my “mentor, guru guy” in the hope that he will save me the time of having to look it up. Well, you can guess the response I got. My “mentor, guru guy” is determined to make me think about everything.
“What do you want to do?”, he says. I respond with a little nervousness because I know I should have gone and thought about it first. “I want to pull a piece out of the cube.” To my very big surprise, he answers me. “Only because you are a baby and your vocabulary is not developed yet, I will help you.”
“To pull a piece out of an object is to extrude. To push a face inward is to reverse or negative extrude. It is like opening and closing a drawer.” he says with his teaching voice. “Now, go and do it.”
I “extrude” a big sigh of relief. That was not so bad.
I go back to my theory notes and look up the extrude tool.
I have made all the loop cuts. That was an achievement on its own. Now I need to extrude the face created by the loop cuts.
“E” is the shortcut for the extrude tool. It is simple. In edit mode, select the face that needs extruding and press “E”. I imagine in my baby blender brain that I have tied a rope onto the face, and I pull until it comes out. It slips out as smoothly as a wet bar of soap from the tiny hands of a baby.
There are two ways of doing the extrude. Either use the Extrude tool or use the keyboard Shortcut (E). Once the tool is accessed a yellow paddle with a black cross appears. This paddle can be pulled in a direction and at the distance required. A pop-up dialogue box appears in the bottom corner of the screen where specific details can be filled in for example the distance of the extrusion. Hit enter to apply and it is done.
Now the face is pulled out and I give a little baby Fred giggle because this is fun. Kids like opening and closing stuff.
The real power does not lie in my ability to get this face pulled out. It lies in the perfect shape of the object I have just created. It is the power of achievement, but it is a temporary high. The next challenge is already looming in the background.
Even baby Blenders can do big things!
