Normals.

 The upper torso is almost complete, some rivets and decorations are needed but those can wait.
Today my work on the dread has been slowed down. I began  creating the point where the dread legs join the torso. The shape consists of 4 curcle and 5 modified Rectangles (see below).  I first made the right side then cloned and rotated, then unified them with boolean. When I selected all the polygons in order to extract them, I noticed that some where darker, I thought it might be a shadow from the dread torso next to it.

When I tryed to extract; the left side extracted towards the front while the right side towards the back. remembering what Steve said about fasing during the second lecture, I realized I had the "normals" of the cloned and rotated group fasing backwards. It took me more than an hour though to find the trick, I knew I wanted to flip the normals but could not find how. You see the modifier list has "edit normals " and plain "normals" in edit normals you can alter the lenght of the normals and their apperance and there are some methods in selecting them.
In "normals" you can flip them or unify them. So I selected the normals facing the wrong way and fliped them.

Then I remade to editable poly

 And finaly it extrudes in one direction.

I  belive this will help me in the future.

*I am aware that I could have fliped the objects to avoid needind to flip the normals, but I saw it as an excersise to understand a few things about normals.

*Also discovered the use of backfasing. When ignore backfacing is selected you can select a group as normal but the objects in the grop that are faxing away from the view you are in are not selected.

I created a spere, convert to poly, turned ignore backfacing on. And selected a bunch of polygons.

 With ignore backfasing off you would expext to select the back parts too, but as you see below only the polygons in my selection and only the ones fasing toward my view were selected.