F2 addon redundant?

posted to: Topology Tools

You mention use of the F2 addon in this video, and then demonstrate the walk/fill behaviour of the Make Face command. My original question revolved around some weird behaviour I was getting when filling. After doing a bit of research, it appears that F2's fill edge behaviour was rolled into Blender 2.7.

The weird behaviour relates to using Make Face with 1 vertex selected. With F2 enabled, filling using a vertex will create an orthoganol quad using the selected vertex, the 2 surrounding vertices, and a 4th derived vertex. The default behaviour simply makes a triangle.

If you want to test this behaviour: Create a box. Randomize the vertices of box. Delete one face. Select one open vertex and hit F.

Alternatively: Delete one face. Create one triangle by selecting 3 vertices. Attempt to fill the other triangle by selecting 1 vertex and hitting F.

At this point, I'm not sure what the practical application of this would be. Is the F2 addon useful anymore, now that Blender replicates the walk/fill behaviour? Is the bonus behaviour with single vertex filling useful?

  • Jonathan Lampel replied

    Hey astute (you live up to your name here!) I got so used to having F2 enabled that I didn't even realize it was rolled into 2.7. At this point then it's not really necessary to use the addon unless you want that vertex to quad behavior that you mentioned. The triangle fill seems more predictable, but whether it's more useful or not is personal preference. 

    Thanks for pointing that out! 

  • Grant (astute) replied

    Thank you, and no problem at all. I've been approaching these tutorials with the mindset of unlearning my bad habits, and I just wanted to make sure that way down the line it wouldn't bite me in the butt if I worked without F2.

    Great tutorials, by the way, it's been very illuminating.