This is the shape I have right now, I want to turn it into a cylinder with 9 holes in it.
I’ve been trying to fill it with quads by just by selecting groups of four vertices and filling, using subdivide where necessary but I keep having the same problem: I will need to add a few more edge loops around the edge of each hole later on and the topology doesn’t end up right to be able to do so.
Where do I start?
try using more vertexes on your middle and outer circles. does this need to be subsurfaced? if not, topography is not that important as long as it’s flat. another approach would be to carefully model a section, and then use spin dup to complete it. then remove doubles.
Yes. I’ll give your suggestions a try.
I think I got it. Is this topology good?
Edit: apparently not, since it looks like crap when subsurfed. I can’t seem to fill this spot without messing up the outer edge or creating EVIL triangles.
Add a loop-cut where I’ve indicated in the image below. Do that all the way around and then do your quad fills.
After all the fills are done, select the circle in the middle and do Alt-Shift-S -> 1 -> Enter to make it circular again.
The strange thing is that the very same cut that you are showing is in the first pic that was posted. Where did these cuts go in the second pic?
Have you tried Looptools - Space, to even out the vertices of the inner/outer circles? It doesn’t always give a perfect result, but combined with ctrl+shift+s and some fiddling it can be very useful in situations like this.
My first thought: If you double the vert count of the outer circle in the first picture, and rotate the inner circle so verts are on the X and Z-planes, you could work on only a quarter of the model with a Mirror modifier for X and Z.
That thing, made out of beziers, extruded to cylinder with holes and slightly beveled, converted to mesh, allows nicely for a subsurf. So, drop some bezier 2d cycles, rotate duplicates, etc. Fast, painless. My 0.02$
On the left a version made using mesh technique, on the right, made using beveled curves… then conversion to mesh. Not very nice topology if you ask me. Perhaps there’s a curves technique I’m not aware of?
There is really no reason to turn this into a mesh object if the curves serve the purpose.
@pappy: No, this wont be the best way to model something you want show off wires. But it is fast to model and these triangles help to deliver texture fast in game applications.
Isn’t it supposed to be all tri’s then ?
@Elias79: The rest of the bunch will be dealt behind the scenes anyway. See some threads talking n-gons and no control over how they are converted resulting to changed view especially on low poly models. Every quad ends in tri in video hardware; i don’t think i’m off by mile here.
Point is that during modelling you love quads because it allows easy math for modifiers - subdivision, loopcuts, such. Tris are not flexible in this regard.
