Solidify Problem in Blender - related to Gaia's "The Shoe Quest" Tutorial

[Levia Larsson]

Dear fellow creators,

it took me quite a while, being very intimidated by the complex creation process, but I am finally approaching meshes. This forum has been of great help so far, and I've been digging through various tutorials to get the hang of the (to me) rather newer interface of blender and all its possibilities.

I was able to create a shoe (without heel) following Gaia's Shoe Quest, and everything worked fine (maybe beginner's luck). Now, as I tried to create my own model, I ran into a problem I can't fix. Whether I have overseen a crucial detail or can't see the forest for the trees - I'll be very grateful for any kind of hint.

I ran into the problem when solidifying my shoe. As described in Gaia's tutorial I opened the top of the shoe by selecting and deleting the vertices. Then I applied the solidify modifier and set it to approximately 0.25 thickness. I also placed the solidify modifier above the subsurf modifier as recommended. If you watch the according video to this step, it shows that the upper edge of the shoe suddenly has faces (as seen in this picture). I remember this working well the first time I did it. But this time, I am left with no faces on the edge.

Without those faces and vertices, it seems I can not edit the shoe's inside and outside separately. Whenever I select a loop on the outside, it automatically selects the inside loop as well. I remember being able to edit the inside of the shoe when I first did this tutorial, but this time, I can't seem to disconnect the two sides or, for that matter, connect them with faces via the edge.

Please let me know if you need any more details. Your help is much appreciated.

[Gaia Clary]

I believe that you can NOT select the inside and the outside separately. You have to apply the modifier before you can do that.

[Levia Larsson]

Absolutely right Gaia, thank you. That did the trick.

For some reason though I thought, one should refrain from applying the modifiers too soon. When I applied the solidify modifier, it distorted the model very awkwardly along the mirroring line. I had to apply the subsurf first, to get a better result. But I've got a lot more vertices to handle now since the subsurf can't be undone.

This probably will make more sense to me later, once I fully understood when is the best time to apply all modifiers and why. But for now, thank you, this solved my problem for the moment! =)