Reply To: Extrusion at perfect angle problem

Thanks Max. For that extrusion part or the scaling along the normals, Blender a lot of times acts wonky when you try to do an operation like extruding or scaling and it all has to do with the direction the normals are pointing. There’s no easy way to control that, other than being mindful of your local orientations and such. It feels easy when your axis are aligned with the world, but when we start introducing rotations, moving vertices around, subdiving, etc, transforms operations go all over the place. So from time to time we have to manually readjust things, it’s no big deal really. 

One tactic JL does all the time is aligning the transforms local axis to the object. It’s a way of getting so decent alignment when you have lost them. You can see it here, around 17:50

https://cgcookie.mavenseed.com/lessons/modeling-the-left-leg-i

Also you can watch quick refreshers on transforms orientations here:

https://cgcookie.mavenseed.com/lessons/transform-orientations

And a refresher of Normals here:

https://cgcookie.mavenseed.com/lessons/the-normal-direction

And orientations and pivots refresher:

https://cgcookie.mavenseed.com/lessons/orientations-and-pivot-points

All those stuff go hand in hand with the problems you are experiencing. Blender and 3D in general is a big beast to slain, it doesn’t go down easy. But if you keep at it, you’ll see how you can control the beast and make it your friend. Like the lady in Game of Thrones and had Dragons as pets. That can be you if you master this, so keep at it, it’ll get easier and easier.