How to create hole in curved mesh?

I am working on making a and wanted to add some maneuvering thrusters to the hull. I am fairly new to Blender and am not sure the best method to go about this. Any ideas?
(ship for reference, the selected face is about where I would want to make the hole)

Do you want a perfectly round hole, or more of an oval shape?

Oval works, just something that looks like a reaction thruster on the space shuttle or something

best way:

  1. make an overal shape
  2. Subdivide, so it will be actually curved
  3. Plan where you need holes (draw them with annotation tool, for example)
  4. Make retopo of the model with the holes.

this could be done for only part of the mesh. But, imho, it’s usually better to retopologize the whole piece of geo - so you could keep curved shape with clean topology

It looks like you already applied subdiv modifier on your model, so I guess you won’t be adding another one. Too bad you did that already.If you hadn’t, it would be much easier. Do you still have a copy of the original before you applied it?

Whatever the case, if you added two loops crosswise where that face is that you want to put the hole in, to give it some extra edges to work with, and then inset the face (including the new ones just created) , you would have eight sides to form a hole. Then you can use the Circle tool in the LoopTools menu to create the circular shape for the hole.

Another way might be to extrude the face on it’s normal, then bevel the side edges of the part you just extruded in order to form the hole shape, and then delete the extruded faces, leaving the hole.

1 Like

I took backups of the model before applying the subdiv. I posted the applied model to better convey where I was looking to put the shapes. I will give those tips a shot though to see how they look. Thankyou for the suggestions!

why not extrude the face , size it down then extrude it inwards, select the four inner edges and apply bevel on it?

1 Like

Use a new copy without subdiv on it. Make the hole and then add the modifier but don’t apply it right away because you might need to fix up the area around the hole to make it look smooth when the modifier is on it.

Once you get the hang of making holes in curved meshes, it becomes very easy to make them look perfect.

You can also cut out the hole knife projecting the desired shape onto the surface and removing the faces selected. I believe it’s the most flexible way.