For the part of the video around 27:05 minutes, we're instructed to select every other strip for the inset to work how we want it. I might have missed it, but I'm not sure why this fixes it since it seems like a hacky solution. I'm curious just to have some intuition on how this works, or if it's maybe just something to memorize that doesn't have much reason behind it.
Hi Nolan NNuolong ,
First of all, it is indeed a hacky solution, but although there are other ways to do this, they will all be hacky.
Let's get back to the problem: there are two ways the Inset tool can work: Insetting all connected Faces, or Insetting all Faces individually, which are both not what we want here.
Now, the solution is to make sure that the Faces are not connected horizontally. Let me first show you an alternative way, that uses the same principle:
If you Select the Edge Loops like in the left Mesh, then press V, those Edge Loops 'split', so the Faces are separated, which is shown in the exaggerated right Mesh in the image:
This would make the Inset work as we want, because those Faces are no longer horizontally connected. Then, after the Insetting, you'd need to Select all (with A) and run a M > Merge > By Distance, because you'd have created some so-called 'Double Vertices' with the V command.
Another way of doing this, is how it is done in the Tutorial, to Select every other set of Faces, so they are also not connected horizontally (because there are un-Selected Faces in between them).
Like I said before, there are other ways of doing this, but they're all a bit hacky and these two methods are the easiest ones, that I can think of....
I wouldn't call it a hack, it's just that modeling is a huge endeavor and if you spend all your time doing things manually, operations are going to take forever, so we find ways to optimize thing to reach our end goal. A hack would be stressing something to the point of breaking. It's much like the select similar menu, as in Blender takes advantage of certain properties that are present in the mesh and leans on their similarities to maximize ways in favor of time spent on the model. In other words, it's like squeezing oranges with your bare hands versus one of those plastic things where you press the orange against it versus and electric fruit squeezer, each time you are just elevating the productivity and doing things with less effort.