Editing vertices in multiple planes

Question

Hi I'm trying to model a fish. I have begun to extrude planes and scale them. Now I want to edit the shape of the planes together but when I try to move all vertices on the horizontal planes there are still vertices that haven't been moved. I tried to remove doubles but it says 0 vertices removed. So I don't understand what could be going on?

You can see that new vertices keep on appearing when I move one thinking there's only one there:

I'm attaching a dropbox and gdrive link:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9lkh5ixluebsryh/sole%20fish%20model.blend?dl=0

https://drive.google.com/open?id=14xlGhm4I69ZJWX0c2wao1TA7rxD0fX-_

Answer 1

If I make W > Remove Doubles it does remove doubles. So you have a lot of vertices overlaying. Also, there are a lot of edges crossing faces but that are actually not part of these faces, that's why when you drag some vertices some edges stay still. I guess when you modeled your mesh you used F to fill the gap between two vertices, but as they were already part of a face, instead of cutting through the face, it has created an independent edge over the existing face, you should have used J to join these vertices. Or maybe you had a vertices grid and you pressed F to fill and it created faces over other faces? Anyway, the best way to fix all this mess is to delete all your faces and keep only vertices, remove doubles, and correctly fill the faces.

Answer 2

I know exactly what pain and suffering you are going through right now. I removed the excessive faces and edges and fixed some minor things as much as I could.

I would really recommend you to try something simpler first and then come back to your fish once you acquired more skills. Start with some minecraft cows or basic shapes like chairs and tables and ashtrays before doing something organic. This project will only generate frustration and you'll end up never touching blender again. Trust my judgement on this.

Here is the fixed file: