Extrude - Box modeling

[bthatcher]

I am getting unexpected results when extruding a face. It appears to be adding an edgeloop around the vertex instead. What am I doing wrong? Thanks. 

[halfstone · Accepted solution]

You are probably better off extruding in your low-res dispaly (the "1" key as opposed to your "3" key).  

Your images look as though you have some extra vertices or extra faces in there.  There are a few ways this can happen: 

If you insert an edge loop and later change your mind and delete it, it will leave vertices behind.  You need to select them and delete them. To do this, go to component mode, select "vertices", and draw a pickbox around all the vertices that aren't on border edges.  Hit the "delete" key.  The ones that don't have complex edge attachment (three edges or more) will be deleted.  This is what you want.  You can avoid this by using "Delete Edge-Vertex" when you want to delete the edges. 

If you select a face and hit "Extrude" but change your mind, know that the extrude has already happened.  You need to immediately "undo", or you will have double faces occupying the same spot (called "Lamina" faces), and four zero-length faces around the perimeter.  You can test for this by going into your display options and turning on "Show Face Centers" temporarily - this will give you little blue dots in the center of a face.  If you see these blue dots on an edge, that means there is a face there.  Click on "Mesh->Cleanup" and clean up your Lamina Faces, or select and delete them manually, or (sometimes) just select the whole model and merge vertices.  

I don't know if this is what's going on - it's just workflow suggestions based on the images I see; this would be my first set of tests.   

One more possibility - the Edit Mesh options menu has been re-organized in 2015 - make sure that the Extrude option you're using is the one associated with faces, not edges or verts.