Polygon scaling, avoid? or nonsense

[catbells007]

Im not exactly clear about what you mean. If you are cutting dividing & slicing then you are adding geometry too the mesh. This is however is quite obviously different from scaling the faces of the polygons, which incidentally is perfectly okay to do and wont cause you any problems.

Hope this helps a little bit!

[dvornik]

I would say scale away. Sometimes in max scale is more useful than anything else. Pay attention to what it's scaled relative to, and in which coordinates.

[Marcel]

I tend to keep away from scaling whole objects with the standard scale tool because it confuses the coordinate system of the object. (I scale with Xform modifier if I need it)

I never head any problems with scaling sub-objects like polygons or vertices, so I see no reason why not to do that.

[sforsyth]

It's actually a very interesting point and it's been raised before by a few people (Paul Steed among others - think it was in his book).
The crux of it is this: why move two connected vertexes when you can just move the edge instead?
Over time, you would save thousands of mouse clicks by just selecting one edge instead of two vertexes. Many people will insist on using vertexes to do this, and I think alot of it is pure habit.
Personally, I try to make a conscious effort to maximise my work flow whenever I can, but I still catch myself doing stuff like selecting vertexes instead of a single edge, or scaling vertex selections instead of poly selections, purely out of habit.

I see no reason not to scale polys, it works fine, so go with it!

[javierdl]

Wow!
This has been a great response :)
I knew it wasn't such a silly issue after all :)

Thank you all,

DrPepperCan

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