How to model perforations on a sphere?

Support Modeling
1

Hi guys. I have to model tea strainer and I’m wondering what is the best way to do perforations on spherical portion of the model?


Cheers n1k

2

Add a sphere and a cyclinder. Make the cylinder a child of the sphere. For the sphere object, go to the “Duplication” panel and set it property to “Faces”. You’ll get a kind of hedgehog. You can delete faces from the sphere so that you have cylinders only at the desired locations. Press Shift+Ctrl+A to “make duplicates real”. Join all dupliates (cylinders) to one object. Now you can use the resulting object as a Boolean modifier (add modifier -> generate -> Boolean, Operation=Difference) to make the wholes in the perforations. Then you can apply the modifier.

3

Here’s another method:

  1. Add a cube.
  2. Add and apply a level 3 subdivision modifier. This will make a polysphere.
  3. Go into edit mode, select all, hit Alt+Shift+S then 1 and Enter (to “spherize” the polysphere)
  4. Remove the top half of the sphere.
  5. Select all verts except the rim.
  6. Inset the faces individually by a small amount (double-tap i key and move the mouse slightly). Make sure the inset is small, this will help to have sharper edges later. EDIT: can inset twice here, first a larger amount, then smaller. This will help make the holes smaller.
  7. Right after the inset, in the operator panel (or F6 popup) uncheck “select outer”, so that the faces are selected, instead of loops around them.
  8. X -> Faces to remove these faces and make holes.
  9. Add Solidify modifier, set the thickness you want and drag Inner and Outer crease settings all the way to 1. Leave the Rim crease at 0.
  10. Add a subdivision surface at level 2.

Done.