Originally posted by ctbram
With the vertex selected press the shift button and the right mouse button and a menu will pop up. One of the options will be "Split Vertex".
By the way two polygons connected by a single vertex is one of the forms of non-manifold geometry. As such you could also correct this by selecting mesh>mesh cleanup... and then going to the remove geometry section and ensure that "non-manifold geometry" is checked. This should automatically split that vertex.
Originally posted by ctbram
Thanks.
Just a note - The menu that pops up when you hold shift and right click is the "context menu" and will be different depending on the component you have selected.
Some of these context menu items do not show up with the same name in the normal poly modeling (now called mesh ...lets out a sigh in anger...) menu.
For instance "split vertex" in the conext menu is equivalent to "mesh edit>detach components".
I could now get on my soap box and rant for 40 minutes about why I dislike the name changes autodesk made in an attempt to impose 3dsmax nomenclature onto maya.
I will always prefer "polygon" instead of "mesh" and "nurbs" instead of "surface".
However, the context names not matching the normal poly edit names I cannot really complain to much about. They differ for a logical reason in that you would have multiple poly edit menu items that all do the same thing just on different components so the poly edit menu items are "general" and the context menu items are specific.
However, they should make an attempt to use the SAME verb as the context menu like component SPLIT and component MERGE instead of DETACH and CONNECT.