Greetings, Blender Artists! I’ve been a lurker for a while and I’ve been getting more and more into the whole Blender scene. This is my first post! Thanks for having me
So I’ve been working on a fancy fountain scene and I have a piece that is essentially sheet metal that I want to cut lovely designs and shapes into. I think it would be easiest to start with drawing these shapes as a separate image that I somehow import into Blender. My first thought was I could make use of the Boolean Modifier after turning the shapes into maybe planes with a Solidify modifier, but I feel there must be a better way.
Is there some way to import an image (say, pure black and white, not grayscale) and apply it to a plane such that the shapes on the image cut away from the plane?
I’ve never tried this, and you’d probably have to set the mesh resolution to unacceptably high levels to make this work, but I guess if you draw solid shapes onto a texture, you could use a Displacement modifier to give you a mesh with the pattern raised up, then you could apply the modifier and delete the raised verts to leave the holes.
Use Knife Project. If shape is easily done using curves - closed 2D curves can be used: start from bezier circle; in edit mode add another. If second one is being created outside circle and moved onto first you’ll see forming cutout. Use Handle type settings if needed.
Thanks for the help! eppo, I didn’t know about the Knife Project before, but that’s pretty much exactly what I needed. I just now taught myself how to use Bézier curves and gave the Knife Project a shot, and I’m very happy with the result. I did have to subdivide the mesh a crazy amount, and hopefully that won’t casue issues.
JiggyWig, that’s an interesting idea. It seems as you say it would need to be a very high-poly mesh to look good.
Hello, maybe this video "Cutting decoration hole in object 3D model Blender " will help you:
. It is very simple way to cut hole as any shape you want. Start with convert your bitmap graphic to vector in Inkscape, save as SVG, next import SVG file into Blender, convert from Path to Mesh, and make 3D model by extruding. Now with Boolean modifier you can cut as you want Hope it is what you need.Edit: after import SVG you have Path, so if you prefer knife tool you do not need to convert to Mesh.
place57, I didn’t know that was possible, that sounds like it might be the least computationally intensive option because you don’t have huge-poly meshes. It’s a subtle point, but I also wanted to solidify the planes slightly. Would your option still work for that?
PiotrPL, if you’ll look this was actually the solution that I first thought of, but I’ve not tried it. I’ve heard the Boolean Modifier can give you really terrible meshes (sometimes with errors?). But since I’m not modeling it further, that might not matter. So the best would probably just be the one with the least faces that still looks the same. For those interested, here’s what the mesh looks like on my decorated cube. It has 85k faces. This is the result after using the Decimate modifier (collapse at 0.06 ratio)
