Learning Blender: A Hands-On Guide to Creating 3D Animated Characters

Delete and Dissolve

In Blender, when you have some of a mesh’s elements selected and you press X, a menu will appear that gives you several options. You can use Delete to remove vertices, edges, or faces, and that will have a variety of effects. If you select one of the other options such as “Only Faces,” only the faces will be deleted, but the edges and vertices will remain.

You’ll also see an option for Dissolve, which is similar to Delete except that instead of making elements disappear, it replaces them with a single n-gon. This comes in handy when you’re working on complex surfaces and you need to adjust the way in which the edges are placed: you dissolve the faces and then reconnect the remaining vertices manually (see Figure 6.10).