I’m trying to build a bath sponge in Blender, and I am hitting a snag.
BTW [no joy in the Knowledge base or google search]
I’ve tried to create it using a bump map texture, but the 3d sponge holes just aren’t realistic as the bump map is simulated and isn’t really 3d when close up.
The other option I have been thinking about is building heaps of small spheres and subtracting them from the sponge block mesh.
What I need to do is make about 1000 spheres of varying sizes to subtract from the sponge.
However I don’t seem to be able to do this with a particle system. I can make the spheres but can’t subtract them.
Make the sponge as an object without holes, create a icosphere (level 1), fract subdivide it with 60% randomness twice, make a sponge-hole sphere, parent the weird sphere to the sponge-hole sphere, and click “dupliverts” in the animation buttons on the parent sphere. this will give you a lot of spheres, but I’m not sure it’ll work for subtraction.
You could try Booleans (Very messy mesh…but this is, after all, a sponge). Create all the spheres as individual objects, select them, and experiment with them (Press W). Theres a section on them here too. http://download.blender.org/documentation/html/x1859.html
What about a large metaball (cube shape) and a lot of small metaballs (ball) as dupliverts of a fractal subdivided mesh cube inside the metaball cube. The small balls set to negative.
But I just tried it and the main drawback of the meta ball thing is that you almost need a renderfarm like for Lord of the rings to get a good result.
Therefor I thing it’s not the best solution.
So I was intrigued by this problem and made the following: http://www.sfsierrasingles.8m.net/blender/aSPONGE.png
The middle object was first created with curve/circles, then converted to a mesh and extruded. I then used a close-up image of it as a texture for the sphere on the left and the 2 meta balls on the right.
Blue background ‘lamp’ and pale yellow square spotlight from front.
A quick way to maybe solve your problem.[/img]
You can do it with mesh on a particle system if you convert the particles to a separate mesh first. I think you can select the emitter and then Alt+c (or maybe it’s Ctrl+c) to convert the system to a static mesh, then just subtract it from the ‘sponge’ object.
my method would be, I think… as usual… add cube, turn on subsurf, subdivide couple of times, then remove some faces and extrude inwards from the holes.
