This is a short tutorial about a little-known extrusion method in Blender that can be very useful in many situations.
Video Transcript
Hello everyone! This is a short tutorial about a little-known extrusion method in Blender that can be very useful in many situations. It's the Extrude to Cursor tool, available in Edit Mode and activated by combining CTRL and the right mouse click. This tool works whether elements are selected or not.
As with many of my other video tutorials, the PDF version of this tutorial is available for free download at the link in the description. This is also a great time to subscribe to the channel and enable notifications so you won’t miss any future tutorials!
Specifically, if you have at least one vertex selected and press CTRL while right-clicking, Blender will extrude exactly to the location of the mouse cursor.
It’s recommended to use this tool in one of the orthographic views to ensure that the depth of the created elements remains consistent.
The Extrude to Cursor tool can also be used with multiple selected vertices. This can be helpful for modeling curved or bent objects such as handles, hooks, the handle of a cup, or other parts and objects, starting from edges that serve as a profile to extrude.
When performing Extrude to Cursor on an edge, you’ll immediately notice that the original edge is slightly rotated to create a smoother transition toward the target edge and avoid face overlaps.
This rotation can be avoided by using the key combination CTRL + SHIFT + Right-Click.
The Extrude to Cursor tool also works when no elements are selected, as long as you are in Edit Mode. In this case, Extrude to Cursor will create a new isolated vertex at the location of the mouse cursor, allowing you to create additional elements with simple extrusions. This feature can be especially useful when you need to create separate elements within the same object.
I mentioned that the key combination is CTRL + Right-Click, but this is valid only if you have set the left mouse button as the object selection button. You can change the selection button in the Keymap section of the Preferences menu. The left mouse button has been the default selection button in recent versions of Blender, but if any of you are still using right-click selection, then Extrude to Cursor will require the combination CTRL + Left-Click.
Before wrapping up this tutorial, let’s review some methods for selecting or creating vertices or edge loops that might come in handy for editing the geometry created with Extrude to Cursor.
If you’ve created simple edges, you can add new vertices between existing ones by using Subdivide.
You can also create multiple vertices starting from the selected vertex, smoothing the connections to neighboring vertices using Bevel on the vertex. The shortcut for this is CTRL + SHIFT + B and the mouse scroll wheel.
The shortcut for the Bevel tool on edges is CTRL + B and the mouse scroll wheel.
To cut a face or a loop of faces in half, you can use the Loop Cut and Slide tool with the shortcut CTRL + R.
Finally, to create smoothed connections between two edge loops, you can follow these steps. First, create an intermediate edge loop using Loop Cut and Slide and then delete it to break the connection between the two edge loops.
Next, select both edge loops and use the Bridge Edge Loops tool, then increase the Number of Cuts parameter of this tool.
This tool, which I’ve already covered in a previous video tutorial, also provides additional options like Smoothness and Profile Factor, allowing you to further refine the connection.
Well, that’s all for this very brief tutorial on the Extrude to Cursor tool! I hope you found it useful! See you next time!