Is there any way to move vertices en-masse along their own normals

Support Modeling
1

Hi all. Here’s my situation;. I’ve carefully marked out lots of details, by marking edges as sharp. and i would now like to sink those sharpened edges into the object, to create sharp grooves. However the object is very organic and complex, and there’/s nowhere i can set the pivot point that i’ll get a good result by scaling down

All of the vertices have normals, of course. Which pretty much point along the desired direction of motion.
So what i would like to do in that regard, is just to select all my vertices, and move them en-masse along each of their individual normal vectors. I can’t figure out any way to accomplish this except one at a time, though.

can anyone point me in the right direction?

2

Have you tried “alt s” (together) in edit mode, with verts selected.

3

that seems to slide all the vertices back and forth along some global axis, definitely not what i wanted

4

What ‘Pivot Point’ are you using?

If you ‘Shrink/Fatten’ [alt-s] when using pivoting around ‘Individual Origins’ it will, strangely, move along a single axis.

5

an alternative possibility; all my vertices are rigged to a skeleton. if i could have them all scale towards/away from the nearest bone, that would be fine too.

6

oh wow, thanks dan, you’re right. changing it to median point made it work. WOO :slight_smile:

7

From the wiki: nothing global about it.
"This tool translates selected vertices/edges/faces along their own normal (perpendicular to the face), which, on “standard normal meshes”, will shrink/fatten them.
This transform tool does not take into account the pivot point or transform orientation. "

Edit, I see it’s working now.

8

Yeah, it’s strange, all ‘Pivot Point’ settings work the same, just not ‘Individual Origins’…

9

Just reminding you
the shrink/fatten (alt+S) in edit mode has an equivalent in obj mode. The displacement modifier. Just enable it and play with strength.