How to edit Geometry for extrusion I'm trying to model this character's helmet as an exercise, and I've reached a snag. As you can see from the photograph, the geometry behind the gem cross straight over the helmet, but as it stands, the edges on my sphere all converge at the center, making it very difficult to get a clean extrusion. I'm currently experimenting with dissolving that center vertex and then quadding the remaining hole so I can manipulate the loops more easily, but I feel as though there must be a better way. How should I go about editing it to rectify the issue? Thank you so much!
Yeah, UV spheres aren't generally the start of great topo.  There are times when they'll work, but more often than not, they're just headaches.

Consider using what I call a cube-sphere:



I started out by subdividing my cube with 2 cuts (so I can get that center stripe), then used the "to sphere" operator (which I use rarely enough that I just call it from the spacebar search, so I don't know the hotkey.)  Give it the full factor (1.0) for the to-sphere, and you've basically shrinkwrapped your cube to the surface of a sphere.

I've got two levels of subdivision in that pic afterwards.  You can write your subdivision as you go and need more detail, but as always, it's smart to work from low detail to high detail, from big to small.  I think you'll find that a lot of your extrusions come more easily from starting with topo appropriate to what you're going to end up with.  (Of course, you can always retopo afterwards too.)