As a practice, i’ve been trying to model the ‘a330s -lamp’ by Alvar Aalto. At the bottom of the lamp, theres about 100 holes/ cutouts, which are causing some headache. I did the maid body of the lamp from a cylinder. Then i created two objects based on the shape of those cutouts and arrayed them around the main body. After applying the boolean (difference) modifier and then deleting the cutting parts, the upper shape gets cut from the outside surface of the lamp, but extends to inside of it. Lower shape (cylinder) just merges to the main body after applying (See picture). Am i doing something wrong with boolean, what kind of issues there might be? (I’ve tried flipping normals.)
Later on, i would need to subdivide and also apply thickness to the main body - so i’ve a feeling that boolean might not be the best method for this. How would you approach this kind of model?
Here’s link where you can see the lamp:
End result after boolean: This is just the lower part of the main body.
I wouldn’t do it with booleans. See images of the breakdown. When scaling the middle vertices of the holes, I changed the transform orientations to “Normals” instead of global. FYI. I started with a circle of about 200 vertices and then basically extruded and scaled downwards. Once I created the shapes that were making the holes, I removed the faces. After that, I also added a subsurface modifier and solidify afterwards. Don’t forget to Shade Smooth the mesh. Hope that helps. However, you’ll probably need more vertices to get the smaller holes like the actual lamp. A little painstaking but the results are there.
You could simplify it a little more by modeling just one section then use an array modifier circle to get the rest of it without modeling all those cutouts.
Hey there. Here is the simplest way I could think of. The step is you want to model the lamp and design in two seperate meshes. My main lamp is just cylinder with smooth shading enabled and under object data properties>normals>auto smooth turned on. And as for the design you can see on the right it is just a plane subdivided a few times and with a few faces deleted. And apply the modifiers shown in the modifiers panel. Hope this helps.
