(lets try this again. I accidentally deleted the post right as I was about to submit it. xD Hopefully I am communicating clearly idk.)

With X-Ray on we can easily see what we have selected, and you can see what I’m trying to describe:

If you had accidentally selected an additional face that you don’t want to modify and you were using X-Ray to check, it’d look like this:

With X-Ray on you can click through the surface of the model and select/deselect things as if they were unobstructed. So we would hold shift and click the dot at the very center of the extra face to deselect it. If you were in vertex or edge mode it’d be the same thing, except you click directly on the vertex or the edge, rather than at the center point.

Anyway, toggling X-Ray off so we can get back to work, I rotate the view back around to the side, similar to where we started.

There are a few ways to join these things together. I’ll show you how to use scaling and vertex merging. If I’m feeling really bored or if you ask for info, there are at least two other ways I can think of to do this that I can post about.

Lets literally bring them together to meet in the middle.

We use the extrude tool to add the extra geometry. Press ‘e’ to create the extrusion and immediately right click to finish it without placing it. This will leave the extrusion sitting flush with the geometry it was created from. No point in a screenshot because it shouldn’t look any different.

We now want to bring the two extruded faces together so we can join them. We will do this by scaling the position of the two faces’ vertices relative to each other along an axis until the gap closes.

Press ‘s’ to scale, press ‘z’ to lock the scaling to the z axis and type 0 (zero) and press enter. This should pull the top edge down and the bottom edge up to meet at the middle, as the distance between them along the Z axis is scaled to zero.

They should still be selected. Right now if you weren’t actively working on the project it would be very hard to know that there are two sets of everything sitting in exactly the same place in 3D space. So we will merge them right away.

With the faces still selected, press m to bring up the merge vertices menu (or in vertex mode, right click and choose Merge vertices:

And choose By distance. This will merge all vertices that are close enough together, and the ones we are interested in are right on top of each other, so that’s all you need to do.

Merging vertices is pretty useful though and a lot of the time you will need to pop open the Merge by Distance parameter editor in the bottom left and increase the merge distance so you have more leeway.

If you don’t want to edit the parameters (you don’t need to for this handle) then the merge is already complete. It remains adjustable until you do something else though, so as long as the parameter box is still open you can tweak what it applies to. If you want to, you can drag that distance up to like 10 meters and watch all 8 vertices collapse down to 1 vertex.

You’ll develop more of an intuition for scale over time cuz the same sort of “snapping” distance is used with the mirror modifier to join a mirrored half onto something you’re modelling. Game engines tend to be opinionated about scale too, so if you end up doing that you will end up optimising your habits towards that I imagine.

Anyway. We merged the vertices, but we didn’t do anything with the faces. The two faces became one and the eight edges became four. With the face hidden inside the model.

If you knock a hole through the hull you can see it and select it:

If you do that, you can press x to delete and pick Faces or Only Faces from the top part of the delete menu. This should leave everything else intact:

And you can close the hole by pressing 1 to select vertex mode, shift click to select each of the four vertices around the outside of the hole. (I toggle X-Ray to make sure I didn’t click any more than that…)

And press f to create a face from the vertices.

And that’s closed back up. Could just use X-Ray to select the face and delete it without making a hole in the hull. So wtf was that for? Learning opportunity. Anyway-

It’s not quite right. That’s not what I want, there’s still that extra loop in the middle of the handle.

If we select the edge loop that forms the outside of the extra face, we can dissolve the edges, which with this geometry, will connect the upper and lower halve.

Switch to edge edit ‘2’ and select one of the errant edges that used to form the outside of the face we deleted.

Then go to the select menu, pick “Select loops” and choose “Edge loops.” This will automatically try to select every loop that the selected edge(s) are a part of.

(I say try because if you have complex geometry and you don’t know what you’re doing (me) you often end up unable to create and select full loops with the built in tool.)

Now hit ‘x’ to delete and pick Edge loops at the bottom:

With a little luck you now have something similar to what you were hoping for. But I’m sure I lost the fuckin plot at some point.

There is an easier and quicker way, explained and illustrated in pt.3.

I’m hoping that this wasn’t too tedious. I use all of this stuff fairly regularly so I figured walking through a few approaches that cover different things I find useful might be the best way I can be useful. For me once I mess around with a tool or modifier or w/e while following a tutorial, even if I forget the specifics I at least know it exists and that I should look for it when needed.

2/3

you are amazing!!! i’m gonna work through your instructions now!!! thank you thank you thank you :D