All I’m trying to do is make a hollow sphere with lots of circular holes in it. You’d think that would be relatively easy; it’s not like I’m making feathers here…
Has anyone yet figured out a way to make good, controllable holes in a mesh? Or (please God) are Booleans fixed for 2.3?
I can subdivide the sphere lots and then manually cut out some vertices (after I move the cursor to a vertex at the center of the projected hole), and then select the edges and use To Sphere. This isn’t bad, but the sphere distorts a bit around the hole and I cannot place the hole precisely (which makes it basically impossible to make regularly spaced holes).
I can make the sphere and a cylinder and use the boolean functions, but it makes a horrifically messy mesh (that looks like crud if I Rem Doubles) at low subdivision levels, and if I subdivide it beforehand to make the mess less egregious, Blender crashes while calculating…
I suppose I could use a ‘polka-dot’ texture and use alpha to fake the holes, but then they have no bevelling and no depth…
Any better ideas? Or is there another modelling program that makes decent controllable holes (and Wings3d isn’t it… Spent all last night trying that one…)?
Here’s a thought for you: have you tried playing with icospheres?
Add an icosphere (try 4 subdivisions), look for the vertices which are only connected to 5 faces rather than 6, and delete these. Then subsurf, and you will have circular holes.
It’s probably not a lot of help, since you can’t delete that many vertices. Also deleting other vertices doesn’t give circular holes, so you’re quite restricted. But maybe if you play with it you can come up with something.
Another thing, which I haven’t tried, is the displacement script (do a search of the python forum). This lets you do the same thing as the “noise” function to any object - so you could apply your polka dot pattern, then delete any vertices sticking out.
Using a 4 subdivision Icosphere and deleting some vertices, you get this result
I extruded the sphere and scaled it down for thickness, and the subserf is set to 3 for more rounded holes. It’s not perfect but it might be close enough.
The icosphere/subdivide suggestions have certainly been the closest thing thus far and might be workable. It’s not perfect, but that’s life…
I’ll try the couple scripts I ran across, too. We’ll see.
Thanks for the suggestions, folks. You’d think this would be simple… But since we have little/no control over vertex normals, I can’t use booleans because of the ‘smudges’ they leave on a “smooth” surface, especially after removing doubled vertexes… What a mess!
The problem exists because of the complex surface of a sphere. I recently ran into a similar problem trying to create a true golf ball, I ended up using an ico sphere(subdiv 6 if I remember correctly) as a refereence map, and manually placing truncated hemispheres at key vertices, then connecting them into one solid mesh…took upwards of 6 hours, buy the result was what I desired.
Disregard the tex maps, I was planning on making a Ladder site for TW2004 but it has been done while I was negotiating a domain. Even if the result is useless, I did find the experience enlightening.
But since we have little/no control over vertex normals, I can’t use booleans because of the ‘smudges’ they leave on a “smooth” surface, especially after removing doubled vertexes… What a mess!