tardygrade

Hi,

I am very new to Houdini - just heard of it and downloaded the apprentice last week and started playing around with it. I am going through just traditional polygon modeling before I start learning procedural and have a couple of questions…

1. Most annoying - say I want to fuse two vertices that are very close and I zoom in. In the perspective viewport they dissapear as if they are culled by the near plane. how do I make it not cull , so i can do fine - editing.
2. How do you align vertices ? For example - in Maya or Max you could select vertices and scale them down until they are aligned. I tried the same in Houdini, but it doesn't seem to stop scaling after they are aligned. Rather, if I move mouse too much it will scale it out of alignment again (hope what I said makes sense…). I assume it's a matter of holding down some key or checking a parameter ?
3. Is there something like turbosmooth in Houdini ? In 3ds/maya you could turbosmooth a rough object and then go around and straighten the edges with loops. Does houdini have a similar workflow in traditional modeling ?

Any help appreciated.
Thanks !