I’m trying to figure out the most efficient way to create ledges on a building without adding additional objects. Let’s say I have a cube and I extrude it upward in increments on the Z axis to create the edges of my ledges. I want to select the upper edge loop of each ledge and scale/extrude it outwards. When I do this, it extrudes the edges out on the X and Y axis as a flat plane. What I want to do, is have the faces below these edges, follow the extrude scale outward, remaining attached to the edges just below them. What I ended up doing is extruding the faces of the ledges outward and then merging all the vertices of the lower edges back to their original extrusion points. This took a while, and I have a feeling that there is a much more time efficient way of doing this. The final result is pictured below:
The arrows are pointing to the ledges, and I have edge loop selected the upper edges for clarification. What I did worked, but I wondered if there was a better way of doing this. Thanks!!!
If you have two edge loops going around to define the top and bottom margins, you can create a new edge loop in between. Then slide that new loop all the way to the top. Alt-S for shrink/fatten, and it moves outwards while staying even. At least that works when a loop is even along a given axis.
I’m not sure I understand the problem. Wouldn’t just selecting those edges and scaling it outward, constrained to XY (Shift-Z) without extruding accomplish the result you want?
One option
Add Edge loops (Ctrl+R) for top and bottom position of ledge
Add an edge loop between then and move up to the top edge loop
With the loop still selected scale outwards (S)
You’re limited though to doing one ledge at a time and each may be slightly different. The best is probably the one you used in the origina post, you can make multiple ledges at once and have them all the same
As soon as your house will be different from default cube shape you’ll find that JuhaW had a suggestion which “just works”.
If i were to build up fast i’d probably used Array of one separated section if that was more than some 5 repetitions (which you could easily Shift-D Z and snap).