Click here for the image and a brief explanation of the problem...
Basically, I've modeled part of a green surgeon's glove. I'd like to model the raised part of the back of one's hand where the bones are. There's a vertex in the middle of the top of the glove from which all the other vertices seem to radiate like a spider's web. This makes it so that I can't get the straight lines I need in the places I need them to make the long bumps on the back of the hand where the bones of the hand would be. Any suggestions on how to get rid of this spider-web pattern? I'd rather not start the whole model again, but if I have to...
Say you had a cube and you split faces on the side (for extrudes etc) the face on the top still remains as one face however it gains lots of edges. ie where you split faces on the sides means the edge that makes up the top face gets split. So what you need to do is to use your split poly tool and split that top face snapping to the verts on the sides.
I hope I make sense. Its hard to type this one out. Really need to show you. Bottom line is that I think you just need to split the face thats causing probs.
I just want to say thanks to everyone who posted to help me on this. My problem has been solved.
I think I should make one thing clear about using Kblom's method, however. Splitting the polygon proxy of the subdivision surface to create the straight lines needed for my project created a weird interference with the already-created subdivision surfaces edges. To fix this, I had to one-by-one delete each new face that was created when I split the polygon. Then, using the "fill hole" polygon editing tool, I RECREATED the surface so that such interference was eliminated and a nice grid remained. I did this each time after creating one polygon split and before creating the next. Should anyone with a better grasp of Maya than I wish to put this in the living Maya faq, I presume that it would be helpful to other amateur users.