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 at least 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 Start from.
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.
A cut that separates the body into pieces gives you a body per piece: the biggest one stays the body you cut, keeping its name, its colour and its visibility, and the others arrive beside it numbered after it. Extrude and Cut has the rule in full.
Push face: no sketch at all
Select a 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 | One or more faces, and nothing else |
| Direction, Start from, Up to | 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 |
One step takes several faces, and they may sit on different bodies. Select the lids of two boxes and one push face lifts both. Each body is treated on its own — Add grows each of them, Subtract takes from each of them, and New body makes one new body per source body — and the picker inside the popover grows the list rather than replacing it, so re-opening it to add a third face keeps the first two. It is all or nothing: if one of the faces will not build, the whole step fails rather than half-pushing the part. The arrow draws on the first face you picked. Set to Add, push face also carries the Fuses with row an extrude has, naming the bodies the material it pulls out welds onto.
The arrow is bidirectional and it means it. Drag it back past the face it started on and the distance goes negative, the material comes out on the other side, and the feature flips from adding to subtracting with it, so pulling out and pushing in are one gesture rather than two tools. The flip only fires when the drag actually crosses the face: stay on the side you started on and the Combine field is left exactly as you set it.
Negative distances are accepted, exactly as on an extrude, because the sign is what says which way the face travels. Type −2 mm and the face goes two millimetres into the body. Only an exactly zero distance is refused, and the magnitude has to stay inside 500 mm.
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.
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