Making a railing

[DocTaotsu]

I'm trying to model a railing on a ship with nice columns rising out of the edge of the deck and topped off by a single beveled rail. I've subdivided and merged every other face to create my columns but my efforts to extrude them in (so they're less than the width of the railing) has been met with little success. So... I'm kinda stuck. I'm looking for a way to push the outer faces inward while avoiding a bunch of deleting and merging. Am I going at this the completely wrong way?

[Sarford]

I think I would add edge loops on the top length of the railing first before extruding the colums out. It will create extra polygons on the top of the railing but you could easely merge that together again.

[AceMastermind]

I know sometimes when i'm trying to model something like that I end up making it in a way that is reverse to what I actually intended because it is quicker, for instance, I would go ahead and make the columns the size they would be when they are done and then make the railing wider by extruding the sides of the railing out.

[DocTaotsu]

Ah! Thanks for the quick responses. I'm a dullard for not thinking to simply extrude wider rails... I actually think it'll even look better especially with some beveling.

I do have another question though. How do I go about scaling those pillars equally without moving them around? Am I not seeing the "scale around individual COG" or is it a matter of how I select the geometry? Basically I want each thing I select to scale around it's own COG.

[AceMastermind]

Yeah that's something i've found to be a bit tricky, you'll get odd results when trying to scale them all at the same time locally or use the Push deformer, the best way I found to do what you're trying to is just use this MoveNormal plugin found here:
http://www.xsibase.com/forum/index.php?board=10;action=display;threadid=21478

Others might have better ways, but the MoveNormal plugin always gets the job done for me the first time around.