Delete and Dissolve Explained - What's the difference and what do they do in Blender?

reasons for this this is our stands of rule and in this video we're going to have a quick look at the dissolve and delete functions in blender so theoretically this is a fairly beginner set of information but I will say there's a little bit more to this than you might realize especially when using the dissolve function so let's just quickly get into this and have a quick talk about things here so what I'm going to do is I'm going to press shift and a and I'm just going to bring in a cube and we're going to look at this Cube so the best way to demonstrate this if I go into vertex mode if you are a beginner you probably won't have this Pi menu which uses Machine Tools you'll probably just press Tab and then it will go to edit mode and then you need to go one two or three but if you want to have a look at Machine Tools I've got a few videos on that it's a free add-on and it's fantastic so I'll put a link in the top right hand corner but to demonstrate this I'm going to press Ctrl and R scroll my mouse will up one to bring in two Edge loops and then click and then escape to have them there and then I'm going to do the same on the other side so we've got this broken up Cube now if we just have a look at these vertices and I just drag and select them the difference between dissolve and delete is fairly easy to demonstrate in its basic instance if I delete these vertices all the surrounding geometry that's directly connected to this is also going to collapse so for example if I delete this vertex these four edges that are coming off of it are also going to collapse and effectively become deleted because their end point is gone and because these are gone that means these faces are also going to be deleted so if I go back in select mode and do that so to delete you can either press delete and it comes up with the options or you can press X and it comes up with the options so I'm going to delete here the vertex and as we expected everything got deleted from the surrounding geometry I'm going to press Ctrl and Z to one do that now dissolving is different you can press X and you've got the dissolve here as well but dissolving well instead of destroying rounding geometry blender will attempt to interpret that geometry to try to keep it for want of a better word alive so these edges won't be able to function so again the edges are going to go but the faces surrounding that technically will be connected to enough vertices and edges to support them so if I press X and then dissolve you'll notice we end up with one face here and that face would be considered an n-gon because it doesn't have four vertices that are making it up so really useful and it makes things very quick and easy if for example you want to change this into one solid face you can just go there and then press X to solve vertices and you've got one face now there is another function here to do dissolving that's going to be quite important in fact there's two other bits that I want to talk about here and that is the fact that now we've got this wall hang on and engons are a problem for some things in blender not most of them most of them it's all right but for example subdivision surfaces if I go into object mode press Ctrl and 2 is going to have some weird outcomes here whereas you'll notice on the bottom where we haven't actually done that yet it's quite smooth here at the top it's well a mess so what we want to do is have a way of deleting or dissolving I should say these vertices out and actually you can do that as well if I just press a to select everything and then X we have this option called limited dissolve and if I click that you'll notice it's going to get rid of all of these points and the way that has worked if I click on the box at the bottom here is it has an angle that determines which vertices are going to be dissolved or not so if I just undo this and go back to where we were you'll see that these vertices are all in a straight line effectively they have an angle of zero which means that they're all going to get dissolved with the exception of the ones that are on a corner because they've got a 90 degree angle if I just demonstrate this further if I just grab those vertices and then G and Y to move them out and do exactly the same thing so a x limited dissolve you will notice that these have not been dissolved because they've got an angle more than five but you can then drag that maximum angle across to get to the point where is going to dissolve those different vertices now at first this can feel a bit difficult to predict because these two vertices didn't get dissolved and instead it dissolved this one here and that one there but actually if you understand why it's not too bad because effectively it will dissolve the one with the angle that is closest to 180 so the one that's closest to Flat which means it's going to dissolve those ones on the side but that limited dissolve is very useful for cleaning up your vertices and your edges at the point when you're mostly finished with a project or you just want to clean up so there's a bit less geometry now the last thing I want to talk to you about is again to do dissolving so I'm just going to bring in a plane and let's scale that a bit bigger and then let's scale that on the Y and I'm going to do the same thing again so going to vertex mode control and R let's put in a couple there and control and R put in a load here and that is that there is a little bit more to the dissolve function than you'd normally expect so again if I just select these two vertices and use them as an example if we press X and delete the vertices we're going to end up taking out all of the supporting geometry that was once attached to it if we press X and dissolve we're going to end up with one big n-gon but we don't necessarily have to if you notice down here we've got a few options which is called face split and tear boundary so if we come here and again you can do this afterwards which is really cool so if I press X dissolve vertices and I go to face split you'll notice that we end up with some edges effectively what blender is doing if I just undo this is It's imagining that instead of just getting rid of these and then deciding that this Edge can be supported by the other edges around it what it's doing is it's taking each of these points and it's moving the more shifting them to the side and we can actually do this manually if you come up here to the auto merge vertices and press GG you can slide it along to there and then GG and slide it along to there and we've got exactly the same result if I undo that grab those X dissolve vertices with the face split on you can see how that ends up now but instead of having a massive end gone we have two triangles and one still a quad we also have this funky feature called Tear boundary which allows you to split the faces in the places where they were less supported which effectively is going to get rid of this middle portion so my way of thinking of it this vertex is going to get moved this way this vertex is going to get moved this way but this Edge being that it's being massively extended is going to get torn as in like it's going to get ripped which means that this face here also gets destroyed as well so if I just undo that and do that again so X to solve vertices so you can see that the tear is ripping that bit away so quite a useful function ways in places that this is going to be useful to do for example if I press a and then e and extrude that up and then select these this gives them quite useful or interesting options when we then press X to solve vertices and we end up with that now I will say this does sometimes cause some problems for example here we can see an issue with this face where it's made or attempted to make one large face because it has not putting our edges there so we might have to fix those by selecting that and that and pressing J to join and there and there and J to join and that will solve that geometry issue so that tearing is something we need to be a little bit careful with and returning to this playing the final thing I should say about dissolving is that you don't have to do this by pressing X and then going to the dissolved vertices there is a shortcut for this probably should have mentioned this at the beginning to be perfectly honest where if you just press Ctrl and X it will dissolve a Vertex so it does make this very quick to do really quickly and you'll notice it still brings up these options in the bottom corner so if we undo that and say for example control X those and then change that to face split we can do that there and then for example here and then here and then here so you can do that relatively quickly and it will keep those options that you've already selected working so just some things to bear in mind there but the important bit about the dissolved vertices in most instances is that it will attempt to support the geometry that's surrounding it whereas the delete function is going to collapse the surrounding geometry so you just need to bear in mind what you want to do hopefully that was useful to people and even if you're not a beginner I hope there's something new in there for you have a great day guys

Channel: Artisans of Vaul

Views: 2,041

Keywords: blender, disolve, dissolve, delete, vertex, trick, tip, guide, tutorial, how to, beginner

Id: p8l-PGew_rI

Length: 9min 13sec (553 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 31 2022