Blender Quick Tip: Scaling Instead Of Extruding On Simple Shapes

This trick is something I've found extremely handy during recent projects as it's a massive time saver. Usually when it comes to extruding faces I do them one by on, while this process works it takes quite a while to do and not only that sometimes you find yourself left with gaps in the model which means you have to sit and merge them all together again.

This gets kind of annoying after a while...

This new method I found whilst working on another project cuts out a lot of the little extra changes you would need to make which of course is going to save you a reasonable amount of time, especially when it comes to more complex models. 

Look how fast that was!

As you can see from the Gif above It's a fairly simple process. Simple select the faces that you want to extrude, press "E" (the normal extrude button) but instead of moving the mouse to extrude the face or typing in a value to extrude it simply left-click to create the new faces. Now you have the new faces created and selected left click on the small box shown below,

And change it to the symbol highlighted in the picture shown here.

Changing this option makes it so that Blender takes the origin or center point of each of the faces and then scales it along that. With this option changed and the faces still selected hit "S" to scale the faces and move the mouse outwards and all of the faces will scale along their own axis. 

I've only really tested this on creating simple shapes like the cylinder shown in this tutorial and have encountered some small problems when testing it on more complex objects. (I'll edit this tutorial If I find a better way to do this with more complex models.).