I started modelling a Colt Anaconda last week and it’s been going mostly well but now I’ve encountered something I’m not sure how to tackle…
Here is the part I’m trying to model:
You can see part of the frame swings out with the cylinder attached, rotating around a cylindrical hinge.
I ignored the eventual necessity of separating the hinged region to begin with as I blocked out the main shape. Now I’m at the point where I need to do something with it and my current work looks like this (with the mirror modifier not yet applied):
The general shape is pretty much accurate but it’s all one piece and perhaps there are more vertices involved than would be ideal for making such a large change at this stage.
I tried moving some vertices around but getting a fully circular shape from what I have already seemed counterproductive. So my current plan is something like this:
I’ve deleted the entire area where the cylindrical hinge will go, and moved out the upper section. The plan from here is to create a cylindrical shape that will fit in the gap, merge that with the upper section, then move it into place and finally snap the frame’s vertices onto the hinge.
- Does that seem like a sensible way of approaching this?
- What problems should I look out for? I wonder about the cylinder having a compatible number of vertices to join with the frame easily… but maybe I could just dissolve some edges etc.
- How should I really have approached this in the first place? It seemed impractical to draw the right outline shape with the vertices that were already present. Maybe just doing it when the vertices were much fewer would have worked?
I experimented with “To Sphere” but that never worked out. I suppose I could create a circle, move it into place but far away from the mesh on another dimension, then snap the other vertices to that? But maybe that wouldn’t be any better than doing what I thought of earlier?
Will experiment more, but I wanted some insight from people with some experience.