I am modeling my room, and i’ve got a desk with lots of little holes. On the place where my keyboard is, there are 30y, 55x. That’s 1650 holes, in a piece of metal that’s 40x60 cms, take or leave a few.
How should I model them, or even, should I model them?
Model one hole. As low-poly as you can stand. Then duplicate it (Shift or Alt D) to make ONE row. Then duplicate that row. Then Select all and remove doubles.
yeah I did that. Still, I need to do that 1650^0,5 times, and that’s a lot.
I don’t care, but in the end the verts are gonna be way too huge to handle. Too much verts, too much faces. I can use decimate, cuz they are very little, so subsurf is of no use. (you can just fit a “sate prikker” in one, it are the little sticks)
So I think I can keep it down. I’ll let you know in a minute or something. First gotta prove my friend wrong, hang on. 
Dammit, Decimate won’t work, it closes like half of the circles. Here’s a screen. :x
It cuts away half of the circles (no even decimate)
Plus the render looks like plant food.
:o 
If it’s not for a close up shot, try a texture with alpha channel
:o
Thanks, solved my problem instantly, that has got to work.
I’ll make a texture with an alpha channel and I’ll apply checker. w00t.
Thanks.
Holes in a desk? Swiss Cheese? Try using a bumpmap.
Bump mapping only allows “bumps” no? Or does it allow to make holes. If yes, how?
Check it out! Here’s my desk!
How do I apply my texture so that it uses it as alpha texture? I can click the alpha as much as I want, option 0,1 or 2, they all don’t work. (At least, not for me)
Help! (Goes looking on Wikipedia) :o
Your texture image must be either black and white - in which case it interpolates black as (either alpha = 0 or 100%…can never remember), or your image must have an alpha channel itself - in which case after loading your image texture, click the “use alpha” button in the load image pane.
Then on your material settings, drop the alpha slider to 0, and click “alpha” in the “map to” pane.
I can’t help but impress myself with this
Here you are. This is what I whipped up in Blender, using a bumpmap.
Oh, and the poly count is 4!
This is your original photograph…
Yaw drop
omfgwtfbbq nice image! How did you do that! Tut-o-ri-aallll!!!
OK, I guess you like it. I will write a tutorial on this right now. Give me a half our to publish a website with all of the iamges need to make this desk top surface.
Thanks-a-lot. I can’t wait.
Since you are probably in a hurry, here’s the BLEND file with the TGA images imbedded. To extract the images (if you want), UnPack the DATA, it will automatically create a new sub directory with the extracted images.
http://mysite.verizon.net/vze3nvj6/Blender/forum/Holes.zip
A few notes:
These “holes” are really not holes, but look like holes because of the black color I added.
There is one image for the BumpMap, and one image for the color.
There is another BumpMap. It is the procedural called Clouds, which is already built-in Blender, to give the surface some texture.
Sorry for the not-responding, I really appreciate the help, but my mom got aggro on me (World of Warcraft 4 lyphe) “Cuz I was too much behind the computer”
Anyways I’m back, i’ll have a look and thanks.
Spin: Nice work on recreating the look of that desk panel.
Daedalus: If you apply Spin’s color map to the Alpha & Specular channels, you should have some ‘real’ holes that you can see through. In the Displacement channel (instead of Bump), it will give true depth (if you happen to need it).
Holy Crap Cire! Why didn’t I think of using an Alpha Channel It works!
Here’s the newest Blend File with the Alpha image…
http://mysite.verizon.net/vze3nvj6/Blender/forum/AlphaHoles.zip
Here’s what it looks like (and still, only 4 polys).
awesomesauce!
that bumpmapping looks incredible.
hope your room turns out well daedalus.
