Offsetting (insetting) a face without extruding

Currently when you drag a face, it extrudes along the normal. I assume the detection of the intent is made so that if I drag the pencil parallel to the the face’s normal it will extrude. It would be nice if I were to drag the pencil perpendicular to the face normal it would inset the face - same as extrude, but the plane of the face would not move along the normal, but rather all points on the new face would move towards the center of the face. Almost all 3d tools have this feature. Usually you have extrude and bevel as kind of one tool. You get beveled edges, when you extrude and inset the face at the same time. You get straight extrude if you don’t inset, and you get only an inset if you don’t extrude. I feel like the inset ability is missing, or I don’t know how to do it.

Not sure I understand. I can think of two things:

  1. Offsetting the profile of the of the face. The offset tool does that currently.
  2. Applying a draft angle on the extrusion. I think you suggest this. It would completely make sense to do that.

I’ve attached a screenshot from another application to explain exactly what I mean. How do I access offset tool? I could not find it at the first glance.

Tools button->Offset

1 Like

I swear it wasn’t there when I looked the first time. Lol. It is there, of course; and I feel like a complete moron. Anyway - it would be awesomely helpful to be able to do it like the extrude - with a pencil gesture, but perpendicular to the the face normal for example.

well, for solid modeling drafting would make more sense I suppose, at least some modelers do it like that. It would be an awesome addition to the basic interaction.

1 Like