 The Extrude tool is one of the fundamental tools for modeling. But what is the Extrude tool? Well, allow me to simply show you. If you select a face and click the Extrude tool in the Quick Tools menu, you'll see this yellow gizmo. This is a normal axis manipulator. But what does that mean? Well, it certainly doesn't look normal, and that's because normals are a type of vector related to faces. Simply put, the normal is the vector that sticks out perpendicular to the surface of a face. If we go ahead and left click drag this manipulator, you'll notice that it duplicates the face and moves it along the normal axis. But it also creates new edges and faces between the original face you had selected and the new duplicate face to maintain a connection. This is Extruding. You can also left click drag anywhere else in the viewport instead to move the extrusion along your viewing plane. You can do this for all types of selections, including multiple faces, vertices and edges. However, if you select multiple faces that point in different directions, you'll notice that your manipulator is pointing at sort of an average value of where all your selected faces are facing. Keep this in mind as we'll come back to it later. It's important to note that if you right click while dragging the manipulator, you can cancel the Extrude, but it will not remove the duplicate faces. This is intentional as it allows you to create new geometry at the same location as the originally selected geometry. This can be very helpful when wanting to scale or rotate your extruded mesh. For example, what if we wanted to create a stack of connected cubes? You could simply extrude, right click cancel and press S to scale your extrusion down. This will then let you extrude again and confirm to create the new smaller box. This was made super easy by the fact that the extrusion cancel brings the extruded geometry down back to the original cube surface. However, if you do this on accident and you want to remove the extrusion, just make sure you press Ctrl Z to undo it properly. For hotkey users, simply press E as an extrude to begin moving the extruded selection along its normal vector. Right click will do the same thing I mentioned before and left click will confirm your extrusion. But the Extrude tool has a few more tricks up its sleeve. If you click and drag the Extrude tool icon in the Quick Tools menu, it will open up a submenu with more extrude options. The first option is our default option, so we'll skip that. But our next option is called Extrude Along Normals. This is what you might prefer to use if you select multiple faces that point in different directions. This will allow you to sort of push the geometry outwards along each individual faces' normals, but still keep the faces connected to each other after extrusion. This is great for adding a layer of thickness to your mesh, for example. The next extrude subtool is the Extrude Individual tool. This is extremely helpful for making certain faces extend out independently from its neighbors. For example, you could use this to create spikes or stylized bumps on a surface. Quick tip, this tool works best when faces are selected, not floating vertices or edges. The final Extrude tool is very powerful and easy to use. It's called the Extrude to Cursor tool and allows you to extrude your selection and extend it to the location of wherever you left click in the viewport. This will still be along your viewing plane, but allows you to work very roughly and quickly when you need to. For hotkey users, if you're in edit mode, you can actually access the Extrude to Cursor tool at any time by simply holding CTRL and right-clicking. Now that we've learned about the Extrude tool, I'm going to go ahead and show you how to make that chair I made earlier. This is what we want to make, and here's how we do it with the Extrude tool. Simply select your cube, go into edit mode, and scale the cube down along the z-axis. We will then use the Loop Cut tool, which will be covered in its own video, to make some additional cuts on our cube. To use the Loop Cut tool, simply select it on the Quick Tools menu and left-click drag to create a tic-tac-toe pattern, like so. This will then allow us to use our Extrude tool. Using face select mode, select the faces you would want to use to form the back of the chair as well as the legs of the chair. You can then go to the Extrude tool and select the subtool, Extrude Along Normals. Then simply left-click drag to bring out both the chair back and the chair legs at the same time. Ta-da! You've officially modeled something in Blender.