Thicken Walls of Building without Distortion I've been designing a building in Blender 2.77a. Tried making the external walls out of scaled and altered cubes, but I had a lot of overlapping faces issues. I then went back and redid it with just planes; now the source of my question is how can I take the shape of the walls, which are made of various sizes of planes and scale it or alter it so that the planes can be made thicker without losing the shape of the structure? Extruding then scaling on one or multiple axis results in glitches in the mesh where the overlapping from alternate positioned planes mix up.

As a bit of information to assist possibly, I have tried doing this same building with Archimesh which works fine for single story simplistic buildings but crashes if making multistory, and cannot do interiors easily. When I made the walls with the solid cubes that were shaped there was so much overlap the Boolean tool actually glitched leaving hangover after vertices were deleted. I have never found a real way to scale or alter even slightly complex shapes without them messing up.
Solidify &amp; Shrink/Fatten

A way to give thickness to planar object is the Solidify modifier you can find in the modifier tab of the object. As you want to keep the profile even, you should enable the Even Thickness checkbox:



This will keep the wall straight and clean till your current topology allows.

Once the modifier has been apply, the correct way to increase the wall's thickness only on the seleced faces is to use the Shrink/Fatten tool you can find in the Transform tab of the Tooshelf or call it with Alt+S shortcut.



Press Alt (or S) while ruiing the command to enable Even Thickness option to keep walls straight during the transformation.