A new Blender 2.5 feature that might make your work a bit easier is vertex pinning. Blender3dArchitect's Allan Brito explains it.
Allan writes:
Here is another article about new features of the upcoming Blender 3d 2.50, and this time I will talk about BMesh again. If you are not aware of what BMesh is, well it's a new system to manage and manipulate mesh objects in Blender. The new system has a lot of enhancements and improvements compared with the way Blender deals with mesh objects today. It's still in development, but we can take a look and test it based on some test builds available in graphicall.org. A new feature has been added to BMesh and it's a pinning system to protect vertices from unwanted transformations.
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10 Comments
VERY useful feature, works when hide/unhide is cumbersome in some cases. Thanks joeedh
Awesome! :D I really needed this a lot of times.
great :D
oh that is sweeet!, it time I started playing around with these bmesh builds
This is indeed a very nice feature. I'm already missing it, even though I've never tried it :-D
This kind of pinning isn't directly related to pinning in the uv editor, but wouldn't it make sense to align the shortcuts for these two functions ?
Consistency indeed is an issue (also concerning color) which will have to be sorted out. The p-key is already used for a couple of other things in Edit Mode and changing that might or might not be a good thing to do. It should by no chance be a decission that was only ill-conceived.
Pinning is heavily w.i.p. at the moment (the version that Allan presents isn't even in SVN yet) and there are a couple of things which might change and some new things might be added (e.g. vertex group support).
The first official release will likely happen some time next year when BMesh gets merged with the main trunk, so there's some time left for optimizations and I would greately appreciate if everybody with ideas would participate in the discussion on the wiki page: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Frigi (Click on "Discussion" at the top of the page after reading it.)
@frigi
You really should post about your work in the news and discussion section on the blender artists forum, I'm sure you will get a lot of positive feedback there :)
This is one of those tools that you immediately miss when you hear about it.
That is a great feature!
Not bad.
wow blender has needed this feature forever. this will come in handy