Booleans, a curved surface and beveled edges. Any suggestions?

[crazycourier]

So I’m going about a modeling task, and I have a direction I’m heading with it to solve a particular problem. But I’m posting this in hopes someone has a better solution/workflow that might help me do this more efficiently.

Basically I’m modeling two carbon fiber pieces of a camera body which consist of a sphere and two side panels. These are no problem to model! Where it’s getting tricky is that the carbon fiber is molded with large “indentations” which is where the screws go to attach it to a metal base.

Punching these out of the side panel or sphere model are no problem using booleans. The obvious side effect unfortunately from using booleans, is the topology goes to crap and smoothing/sub-surf looks horrible. Most importantly, it doesn’t give the smooth transition from the hole to the surface as the real panel has (see attached image).

Here’s a blend file with the panel (and boolean modifier): http://www.thewooddesign.com/blender/boolean_panels-sphere.blend

I’m going to try a number of methods to achieve this (using the remesh modifier, manually retopo the mesh). I couldn’t get the displacement modifier to do what I wanted, Boolean might not be the best either. Curious to see if anyone else out there has a better idea of how to do this better?

Thanks for any suggestions!

[Richard_Marklew]

One option is something like the attached.

Don’t boolean using high res subsurfed objects. If you’re using subsurf anyway keep any cut-outs as simple as possible. Just cut a hole, clean up and then extrude to make the cutout. Reinforce the edges with loops, if you need triangles (try not to) keep them away from curved surfaces and don’t use long thin triangles

Attachments

[JA12]

Fastest way is to clean the boolean result with perimeter loops like Richard said. Edge loops around holes are essential.

Another thing is to use snapping to retopo the object to get better topology and added control over it.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]188317[/ATTACH]

I added mesh circles to where the holes should be and projected them on the surface. Then quickly added the rest of the surface topology, although I forgot to add the face loop around the outer edge.
In the picture there’s the edge loop placing drawn on the right, and on the left I added a slight (positive) angle to the screw mounts because usually you want to avoid non-positive angles in the mold (tool) or it might be impossible to release the part out of it.

[crazycourier]

Great suggestions to both of you, that’s the direction I’m basically headed at this point, not going to be too difficult which is good! Thanks so much!