In this short tutorial on Blender 5, I will talk about the Mesh Tools extension which, among other things, makes it easy to create an Offset, that is, a parallel copy of a selection placed at a constant distance from the original.
Video Transcript
Hello everyone. In this short tutorial on Blender 5, I will talk about the Mesh Tools extension which, among other things, makes it easy to create an Offset, that is, a parallel copy of a selection placed at a constant distance from the original.
On screen I am showing the model I will use for the first example. In this model we can easily identify edge loops to extrude with offset. These edge loops can be selected by holding ALT and right-clicking on an edge.
Extensions are installed in the Extensions section of the Preferences window, which you can open from the Edit menu. In this tab, it should be enough to type the name of the extension in the search field and click the Install button. In my case, I am getting a strange error, presumably due to the connection, but no worries.
Extensions are listed in an official Blender repository. If you have problems installing from Preferences, you can download the extension as a ZIP package to disk.
Once the package is downloaded, you can install it using the Install from Disk option in the Extensions tab. After that, the Mesh Tools tool will be available in the tools menu, which you can open by right-clicking in the 3D Viewport while in Edit Mode.
In Edit Mode, I select an edge loop and choose the Offset Edges tool from those available for the Mesh Tools extension. In the lower left, the panel for this operator will appear, where we can specify the offset value and, most importantly, choose a mode between Offset, Extrude, and Move. Offset mode creates a shifted copy without connections to the original. Extrude mode also creates the connections between the original and the copy. Move mode moves the original based on the specified offset value. Note that the tool also works on multiple edge selections, as I am showing on screen, where I selected two Edge Loops using SHIFT ALT and right-click, in Edges selection mode.
The model I used had all Scale values set to 1, so the scale was uniform and there were no problems using the operator. If the model scale is not uniform, for example after scaling on a single axis in Object Mode, then the result of the operator will not be correct. Remember to check the Scale values of the model and, if necessary, apply the scale transformations. You can do this by pressing CTRL A and choosing Scale from the Apply menu that appears on screen.
Before closing, one drawback. This operator does not work when it detects ambiguities in the shape, referred to here as Overlapped Edge Loops. This is not an issue with the operator itself, but a topology problem, which in fact also appears with other operators or modifiers.
In these cases you can try various solutions. One of them is to split, by duplicating and separating them, the vertices that are causing problems. This can be done by pressing the V key with the vertex selected, as I am showing on screen. Now the Offset operator can be used without issues.
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