In this tutorial, made with Blender 4.1, we will see some basic operations for modeling geometries in Edit Mode; specifically, we will discuss the Poke Faces and Tris-to-Quads operators, especially when used in succession, with some practical examples.
Video Transcript
Hello everyone! In this tutorial, made with Blender 4.1, we will see some basic operations for modeling geometries in Edit Mode; specifically, we will discuss the Poke Faces and Tris-to-Quads operators, especially when used in succession, with some practical examples.
This tutorial is for beginners; in it, I'll show you how to use the operators mentioned in the title and other basic tools in Edit Mode, to show you how to achieve different results starting from simple quadrilateral faces and a few simple operations, hoping that they can help you in other situations, too.
The Poke Faces operator creates a new center vertex in a face and connects this vertex to the other vertices of the face; so, starting from a square, we get a fan of 4 triangular faces that share the central vertex.
From here, we can go on by creating various geometries; for example, we can select the new vertices and move them away from those to which they are connected using Grab along the Normals, individually, thus obtaining small pyramids on the object, useful, for example, for creating Knurled or Diamond Grip Patterns.
To show you an example with multiple faces, I'm adding a Cylinder into the scene and, in Edit Mode, I'm making horizontal cuts with CTRL R and the mouse wheel, using the Loop Cut and Slide operator to obtain quadrilateral faces on the lateral surface of the cylinder.
Regarding Poke Faces, we can proceed as follows: select the quadrilateral faces that we want to transform, then use the Poke Faces operator, which we can choose from the Face menu.
To select only the new vertices, we can select just one of them and then choose Similar by Amount of Connecting Edges from the Select menu.
To move the selected vertices outward, in the specific case of the geometry I'm using, we can proceed with Scaling while locking the vertical axis, by pressing S SHIFT Z in Global mode.
In other situations, with non-symmetric geometries or in general more complex ones, you can proceed with moving along the Normal of each vertex as follows:
Switch to Individual Origins transformation mode.
Press the G key and, immediately after, press Enter, to bring up the Move operator panel.
In that panel, change the Orientation mode to Normal.
Then, modify the value associated with the movement axis, which in these cases should be the Z axis.
The operations seen up to this point are interesting, but that's not all: used in combination with the Tris-to-Quads operator, the Poke Faces operator allows us to obtain knurlings rotated by 45 degrees, resulting in pyramids arranged on diagonal bands rather than vertically and horizontally aligned.
To show you how to achieve this result, I reverted the movement along Normal Z and expanded the selection, starting from the tips of the pyramids, using the Select More operator, whose shortcut is CTRL + NumPad Plus. Then, I removed the two bases of the cylinder from the selection with SHIFT and left mouse button clicks in face selection mode.
With these elements selected, I use the Tris-to-Quads operator from the Faces menu, obtaining the diagonal bands I described earlier.
Starting from this selection, you can obtain the pyramids in the following way:
Press I and immediately after, press Enter to use the Inset operator and bring up its panel.
Then, in the operator's panel, select the Individual checkbox.
Finally, press the M key to call the Merge operator and choose the Collapse option.
This way, you will have regained vertices with 4 edges, which you can select using Select Similar by Amount of Connecting Edges and move away using move along Normals or other techniques, as I showed you before.
If you want to obtain square faces on top of the pyramids thus obtained, you can select the vertices and press CTRL SHIFT B, which is the shortcut for the Bevel operator applied to vertices instead of edges, as usually happens.
The use of Poke Faces, both alone and in combination with Tris-to-Quads, can help you achieve many other types of results, even very different from the one just shown. For example, I'll show you how to create a grid starting from a simple Plane.
After subdividing the Plane to obtain a grid structure, it's sufficient to use Poke and Tris-to-Quads in succession to rearrange the square faces diagonally.
Now, in Edge selection mode, select all the geometry, then exclude the perimeter edges from the selection by pressing SHIFT ALT and left-clicking on one of the perimeter edges.
Next, press the CTRL B combination to perform a Bevel on all selected edges and move the mouse until you achieve the desired thickness for the edges.
Now switch to Face selection mode, select one of the square faces to remove, then choose the Area option from the Select Similar menu. If the selection also includes faces different from those similar to the selected face, you can improve it by adjusting the Threshold parameter of the operator.
Finally, press the X key and choose the Face option from the Delete menu.
The remaining faces can be easily eliminated by selecting the perimeter edges, using ALT and clicking on one of these edges, excluding only the corner edges from this selection (with SHIFT and click), and then deleting the edges with X and Edges.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the tutorial, these are just a few simple examples of the results that can be achieved both with Poke Faces alone and with its use in combination with Tris-to-Quads.
I hope this tutorial has been helpful to you! See you soon!