Invisible wrote:
>>> OK, this one took me a while to figure out. You'd think you extrude 
>>> it by dragging the face that you want to extrude... but no. You just 
>>> click and Blender places faces at random for you.
>>
>> Select faces/edges/vertices, press E to extrude. The newly formed 
>> faces/edges/vertices are automatically selected, and by default you 
>> are put in Grab mode; move the mouse to move them or right-click to 
>> keep them where they are. You can also switch from Grab mode to Scale 
>> or Rotate by pressing S or R.
> 
> This doesn't appear to match the behaviour I observed. Click somewhere 
> and new faces appear. Move the mouse and nothing happens. Click again 
> and more faces appear.
> 
> The faces aren't random though; it appears that if you click exactly 
> half way up the screen, the new geometry is parallel to the existing 
> cube. Click slightly below the midline and the geometry is connected at 
> an angle. Click lower still and it self-intersects in a way I don't 
> quite comprehend yet.

Extrusions are normally done by pressing E.  Select face/edge, press e 
and push it around (or along an axis by typing the axis name).

But you can also do like I tell above when you're constrained to a plane 
(like xy from top view) and it lets you quickly connect lots of extruded 
faces like as if you were drawing.  Good for a belt, I guess, and also 
good to draw SOR surfaces by begining with a plane (a face actually) and 
deleting all but one vertice and then selecting this one, moving it 
along the y axis with ctrl down until it's on y=0, and then changing to 
front view with 1 and clicking along to finally draw your cup or bottle 
or whatever, both outside and inside.  Next, F9 to get to the mesh edit 
panels bellow and search for Spin button.  Change to top view, then hit 
spin 4 times for a complete 360 turn.  You'll probably need the w menu 
and select "Remove doubles" to remove extra vertices on the same 
coordinates and then select all with a and hit ctrl+n to recalculate the 
normals or else it should display some funky black lines along the 
surface...

Have I mentioned block select operations yet?  b while in edit mode and 
it'll let you make a select window by clicking the mouse, pushing it and 
clicking again.  Or you click b again to select with a "brush" and paint 
along the area you want selected.  Size of radius controlled with 
pgup/pgdown.

If you don't want to select geometry in the background, I don't remember 
any keycombo, but the penultimate button while in edit mode in the bar 
just below the 3D view is called "Occlude background geometry".

Also, perhaps too early to tell, but you may also restrict your editing 
to a certain area by selecting the area you're interested and hitting 
shift+h to hide everything else or h to hide the selection.  Bring 
everything back with alt+h.

oh, and at any time undo is ctrl+z indeed.  There's different undos for 
edit mode and object mode, though.

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