Sorry, I'm not explaining myself well again! If I do that, the edges on the tower will be wonky, i.e. not aligned with the rest of the structure. That's no problem in this simple example but could become messy when adding this kind of feature to something more detailed. But as I say, I could probably just set the vertex coordinates of the vertices on the tower but not part of the little wall; I can't think of any situation that wouldn't be possible or desirable...

A couple options:

1) You can select all intended-to-be-coplanar verts, and scale their group z value to 0. Then with them all selected, set them to the desired height.

2) You can model the extra quads on the towers and the rampart floor, delete the quads that would be internal once the fence is built, and then just create new polys from the open vertices, no extrusion necessary. This method may require re-calculating normal values afterwards.

Edit: here's a visual~



[Edited by - BCullis on November 19, 2009 2:06:37 PM]

That's exactly it, Kwizatz, thanks :)

BCullis, I've now added the scale to 0 and set coordinate trick to my toolbox, thanks! And I've been reconstructing faces all over the place, it's worked a treat.

Only thing is, to keep edge loops tidy I'm finding I'm cutting edges and making nice square polys all over the place, resulting in a lot more geometry than is needed, but I guess that's the right way to do it - optimisation will be the last step, or even an automated one, rather than something to do along the way.

Edge loops are more important for deformation and organic modeling, if you're looking to cut down on polycount. However, I've found in Blender (with its lack of n-gon support until 2.5) that it's easier to maintain a clean mesh if you delete and redraw instead of cutting into existing geometry. The <=4 sided constraint generates some weird faces, which is why I use that "F" method I described.

For an object like your castle, you don't necessarily have to create full edgeloops. If a square face has an extra vert added due to being around the corner from a newly created edge, as long as those generated triangles are all coplanar, they won't disturb the mesh or the texture mapping. But like you said, you can always go in and optimize after everything's been modeled.

Ok, maybe I'm just being overly pedantic! I know it was nice that once I'd made the loops all nice I could dead easily select some loops and bevel them, and I'll really easily be able to e.g. add a ledge all the way round the tower. It's nice being able to do edge slice or that alt+click thing.

Thanks for your help again, you can have another level of 'rate up' :)