The "Rip" tool can be used for tearing or ripping parts of a Mesh. The tool is useful, for example, for creating seams to be filled in with new faces, or for opening a "mouth" in a mesh.

Rules for the Rip tool are:

• Use the shortcut Vkey to activate it (a V resembles ripping :). It immediately enters Transform translation mode after, so you can place the detached vertices.
• Rip only works for quads, this because it internally uses the face loop-select to detect the proper faces that need to be ripped
• If only 1 vertex is selected, the edge closest to the mouse cursor defines the direction of the rip seam and what part is being grabbed. In this case there are 4 possible rips directions, so positioning the mouse has to be done a bit careful.
• When edges are selected, the rip seam is defined, so the mouse cursor position only defines which part will be translated after the rip.
• With only 1 vertex selected, you can rip an entire seam step by step. This also works on the edges of a mesh grid.