[Music] The toolbox is great for seeing the tools that you have at your disposal, but soon enough you'll want to do operations like extruding, loop cutting, and beveling with hotkeys. Some functions aren't even found in the toolbox, but are nevertheless things that you'll want to do over and over. In this lesson, we're going to take a look at some of those, specifically subdividing, merging, and filling. I'm going to open up a fresh general preset of Blender, and I'll select my default cube. Hit tab to go into edit mode. And while everything is still selected, I'll go up to this edge menu, and choose subdivide. All of the edges have now been split in two. New edge loops wrap around this cube and vertices have been added to where these loops cross. I'm going to undo this and toggle into face select mode. This time I'm just going to select a single face. I'll call up my edge contextual menu with the hotkey ctrl E and select subdivide. Now just this face subdivides while the rest of the cube seems untouched. Let's open up our last action window. From here, I can increase the number of cuts. And you'll see how the subdivisions now space out. For example, two cuts will give us three edge segments along both dimensions of this face. These intersect, forming these nine new faces. If we untick the box next to where it says create engones, you can see how the adjacent faces now triangulate. Edges are drawn or rather revealed between the newly generated vertices and the unselected ones. Now, Blender is quite good at assuming how to distribute quads and tries in a dynamic setting such as this. As we increase or decrease the number of cuts, you'll see the configuration of tries change. Because this cube is an even primitive, the configuration repeats all the way around in much the same way. Now, I said reveal because under the hood in any 3D program, everything is triangulated. A quad is simply a face made up of two triangles. And an engon is made up of several triangles. I'll reenable create engones here so that we can focus more on the other basics. Let's see what happens when we select two faces that are separated by a face. I'll select this face over here and the opposite face on this cube. Then I'll subdivide. The faces we selected are subdivided as we would expect, but an additional edge has been added across this face here and below on this face here because the edges bordering these two were also selected. I'm going to undo this step and go into edge select mode. Toggle into that with numeral 2. And I'll select this edge ring by holding down Ctrl Alt and then leftclicking on the edge. I'll subdivide and this creates a loop cut through this edge ring but no additional geometry. What happens if a face is defined by less than four or more than four edges though? We'll use another primitive as an example here. Here is a cone. I'm going to give it a base of 12 points and flip it so that its base is pointing upwards. I'll toggle into edit view and in face select mode I'll select a triangular face. Then I'll go to edge subdivide. As we increase the number of cuts, this pattern repeats across the triangular face as it subdivides each of the edges in two. But now let's select this base and engon with 12 edges and subdivide. Nothing seems to have happened. But if we toggle into vertex select mode, each edge has been subdivided as expected. As this was already an engon, it's just now an engon with double the edges. If we untick create engon, the triangles appear to have split, even though technically they are quads. Now, this is because the topology of this cone has it such that these edges here are flat. And it's more efficient to describe this topology in this way. Now let's move on to fill. I'm going to delete an edge here on this cube. And in vertex select mode, I will select this vertex and then this one. Then I'll hit F. And an edge is created. If we now select these two vertices here as well and hit F, then this face is filled in. If we go into edge select mode and select these two edges and hit F, this face will be filled. This is pretty straightforward and easy to understand. And it even has an easy to remember hotkey F for fill. But F can also be used to merge existing faces. Let's say we have a grid here and we want to extrude a section with an irregular shape. We can do a multiple selection then just hit E to extrude. But should we want to do anything to these faces up here in unison, we would have to work with them as a group. And if anything gets deselected, we have to reselect them. So instead, after I select the faces before I extrude, I would hit F to merge them into a single engon, then extrude them. Now I can perform an inset on just this face or a few other operations as well. There's obviously some additional fill options that are best left to more advanced courses. So we'll stop here for now. The next tool at our disposal is merge. This is such a common tool that it also has a really easy to remember hotkey when in edit mode. M. I'll select this cube, toggle into edit mode, and select a couple of vertices. I'll hit M, and this brings up our merge menu. You can see a few choices here. The first is at center. And if we do this, it will simply collapse the vertices to their median point. I'll undo this. And I will shift rightclick to place my cursor over somewhere arbitrary and hit M again and select at cursor. It merges these two vertices but it merges them wherever we placed our cursor. The third one collapse may seem similar to at center but what I'll do is I'll toggle into edge select mode and select these two edges either side of this face so that they're not connected. I'll hit M and choose collapse. Now each vertex at the end of each of these edges has been merged, creating this new common edge. Instead of undoing, let's take a look at our last action window. Here you'll see a drop down where we can switch the merge operation. So let's set this back to center. Now all of the vertices are merged into a single point. Note that this won't work in vertex select mode because if we select all of these vertices, Blender sees all of the edges that connect them, too. The last option looks like it's separate from the others. And there's good reason for this. Let's create a problem. First, I'll go over to my overlays and enable statistics. We can now see our count for various components, including vertices, edges, and faces. I'll select everything by hitting A and then shift D to duplicate these vertices. I'll move this about so you can see that we have indeed duplicated this geometry. And then I'll rightclick to snap them back into place. You can now see that the vertex edge and face count has doubled. I'll select everything with A and then I'll hit M to bring up the merge menu and select by distance. Our counts drop back down and we have a different last action window popup with some options. You can see here that the merge distance is set very low. This distance is a radius and anything inside that will be merged. Let's try another example and I'll just subdivide this edge here. Now I'll slide this vertex close to this corner here but not so close that it overlaps. There's a visible gap here. Now, we could select just these two vertices and do a merge by distance, but it is far more common that we won't see gaps like this and they might be all over your mesh. So, we can simply select everything and do this merge by distance. But this time, we can increase the distance until only these vertices merge. The rest won't because they're outside of that radius of influence. Now, sometimes we want to just get creative and let Blender do the heavy lifting. And for that, we have automerge. That's this button up here. And there are some parameters you can set under its options. Where this comes in most handy is when you want to reduce topology on the fly. Let's say we've made a few loop cuts here and we have no need of all of them, but we've done some other operations and we can't see the last action for our loop cut. I'm going to set my snapping to vertex and then I'll select this loop here, hold down control to turn on snapping as I move, and place this loop directly on this other loop. When I release, you should see that the vertex count dropped slightly. And to check, we could even select one of these vertices, hit G to grab, and move it about, and it looks like the mesh is behaving. That's because these vertices have automerged. I'll admit that sometimes automerge has gotten me into trouble, and the steps to undo were greater than the cleanup required to fix the problems. Before I close the chapter on merge, there's a related and opposite function, and that is to split away components of a mesh. Now the easy way is with the hotkey Y. You can select a vertex, edge or face, hit Y and it comes away. Now note in the case of a connected edge or vertex, you'll create a detached duplicate. But in the case of faces, you can detach this face entirely. Alt M is the hotkey to bring up a menu for split. And it gives you some interesting options. Faces by edges and faces and edges by vertices. What do these two mean? Let's toggle into face select mode on this cube. Select one face. Hit alt m and use faces by edges. We can now click on this face to select it. And when we move it, it has come apart from the cube, leaving these vertices and edges intact. I'll undo this. Toggle into edge select mode and select a single edge. Now I'll use split faces and edges by vertices. If I now select this edge and move it, look at how it splits, it almost folds this face out. This other edge has been duplicated. And if we grab it, we can also move this and these edges split almost like we're unfolding this cube. We've covered quite a bit of ground in these last few lessons when it comes to mesh modeling in edit mode. To really put these into practice, I would suggest jumping onto a follow-up course on mesh modeling. I would recommend Press Start by Jonathan Lumpel. It's also free and you get to create this cool gaming console as the main project. If modeling is something that you'd like to pursue further, I'd also recommend the core fundamentals course on mesh modeling. Revisiting these topics even after doing a more advanced course is still useful because the tips and techniques that are covered in these lessons should help you troubleshoot even the smallest problems down the line. Now, hold up. This isn't the end of the course. We've still got a lot to cover. So, when you're comfortable, let's jump onto the next lesson, which covers modifiers. [Music] Hey, [Music]