Cut and Push Face
Use Cut to remove material with a shape you draw, and Push face to move a face of a body without drawing anything at all. Cut needs a region selected and lives on C; push face needs exactly one planar face selected and lives on Q.
Cut is a preset
The Cut tool (C, with a region selected) makes an extrude with Combine already set to Subtract, and picks the body to cut from what you had selected. With no body in the document yet there is nothing to cut from, so it falls back to a new-body extrude. That is the whole difference. Everything in Extrude and Cut and Where an Extrude Stops applies unchanged: the same directions, the same end conditions, the same offset.
Because it is the same feature, the choice is reversible from the timeline. Open an extrude, switch Combine to Subtract, and it is a cut. The name it was given when you made it stays as it was, because the icon and the behaviour follow the field while the label does not.
Push face: no sketch at all
Select one planar face and press Q. The face gets an arrow. Drag the arrow, or type a number, and the face moves, so the body grows or loses material along it.
Reach for this on the edits that do not deserve a sketch: a plate that should be 3 mm thicker, a pocket one millimetre deeper, a boss pulled up to meet something. There is no profile to draw because the face already is one.
| Needs selected | Exactly one face, and nothing else |
| Direction, Up to, Offset | The same fields an extrude has, with the same meanings |
| Combine | Add (pull out), Subtract (push in), or New body |
| Not available | Regions, twist, stepped bands, which all need a sketch |
The arrow is bidirectional and it means it. Drag it back past the face it started on and the feature flips from adding to subtracting, so pulling out and pushing in are one gesture rather than two tools. The distance itself stays a positive number, and what changed is which side of the face it sits on.
Curved faces are not supported. The button appears when you select a cylinder's side, and then the feature refuses the face, because there is no single direction to push a curved one along. Select a planar face instead.
Negative numbers are not accepted. Distance and offset are positive-only, unlike an extrude, since the arrow already carries the sign. Drag the arrow the other way to change direction.
See also
- Extrude and Cut: the feature Cut is a preset of
- Subtract: removing a body instead of a prism
- Offset Body and Offset Faces: the other way to move a face