While modelling pieces for my low-poly room I ran into a weird glitch that I'm wondering if it's actually a glitch, or if i'm maybe not using blender correctly?
here's what I did:
1. Added a mesh cube.
2. in Edit Mode, subdivided the bottom face only.
3. Did some extrusions from that bottom face.
4. Tried to add a horizontal loop cut (ctrl-R) on the remaining adjacent side faces of the cube. Wouldn't let me or even show the highlighted loop cut to add. When attempting to confirm the non-existent loop cut (thinking maybe it just wasn't showing the pre-confirm highlight)it adds only single vertices at the edge that was clicked on for confirmation; it does NOT add any edges or other vertices.
5. Then tried to just individually subdivide the other side faces instead of loop cut. Doesn't quite do it correctly. Does a similar thing where it will only add the vertices of the subdivide, but doesn't add any of the edges of the subdivide.
It seems like if I subdivide any individual face of a cube, I will not be able add edges to any adjacent faces using loop cut or subdivide. Am I doing something wrong?
Hey ssjp , this is Blender working correctly! It's because those sides are now n-gons. I cover this a bit in the end of the video on loop cuts:
https://cgcookie.com/lesson/loop-cut-and-slide-02393710-1782-4224-97a2-86b0441cf114?wtime=308
For a more in-depth exploration, check out the Mesh Modeling Bootcamp for your next course:
https://cgcookie.com/course/mesh-modeling-bootcamp
Happy modeling!
Oh! that makes sense that loop cuts won't cut through an n-gon. It just looks like it should because it's a cube, but blender's just seeing a 5-sided n-gon.
But the subdivide command doesn't work with n-gons either? it added corresponding vertices, why wouldn't it also make the edge cuts?
There are just too many ways of doing it that it's not clear what the user intends. It's intuitive to us that it should cut "straight across", but that's a relative term that loses meaning as soon as the shape is not a perfect square or is oriented slightly differently. Even a really good algorithm would get it wrong a good chunk of the time. So, you can hit K and quickly knife those cuts in if you need 'em!