With the hollow cylinder here, tangential to all 6 interior faces, there are 6 gaps, marked with red X’s. Basically, I want the inside to be like the cylinder, with the 6 gaps between the corners and the cylinder filled in.
How can I do this? I’m open to various methods, whether it’s subdividing the faces and edges on the inside, or somehow joining the hex tube with a cylinder…I basically want to make a tube (can’t really call it a cylinder if it’s a hex shape, can I?) that has a hexagonal exterior and a circular interior.
Problem solved - so simple and obvious I almost tried to just delete the question, but I’m going to leave it up for others who might have a similar issue.
I’ve had a few months away from Blender and kind of forgot how to think in Blender, but all I had to do was create a cylinder, align it on X and Y planes with the center of the hex tube. Then add a boolean modifier to the hex tube, pick the cylinder as the object and pick “Difference,” and apply the modification.
Another way would of been to add loop cuts to the straight edges, select the inner straight parts and use the loptools circle feature. I do that sort of thing a lot.
It looks like both methods are “variations on a theme,” but this is quite interesting. Sometimes boolean modifiers create a mess for 3D printing. In this particular case, it didn’t, so using a boolean would be faster and easier, but I can think of a number of situations where your method would be far superior than using a boolean, so this is something I’ll be putting in my bookmarks because I know I’ll be using it in the future.
Thank you - this taught me several new things and gave me an alternative method that I know will be useful in the future!
You usually find with Blender, there can be several “solves”, it’s whatever works best for you in that particular instance. I’ll often change my workflow to suit the specific situation I’m in. As you say, sometimes a boolean is quicker and neater.
Yes, I’m finding that as I learn more. It reminds me of the software I wrote for my business back from 2000-2008. When I started, I had to use TCL due to specific needs, but kept hearing about Perl. I was broke, but finally found a discounted book on Perl, started reading it and changed over quickly. I found I was able to work 5-10x faster in Perl than TCL and changed over completely. There’s a saying in Perl, from Larry Wall, the language creator, “TMTOWTDI” (pronounced “tim-towd-dee”), or “There’s More Than One Way To Do It.” That freedom was a major help for me, my style, and part of what made it so easy for me to work so quickly in it.
I’m finding that similar attitude and situation in Blender. Also, I’m finding this forum one of the most helpful and friendliest support forums I’ve ever seen online - and I’ve been online since before people could use DNS to reach a server and back when Usenet was a big deal.
Ha! Yes. I had an Apple //e and an Applecat modem. While most people were doing 300 bd at the time, it’d do 1200 half duplex, which was SCREAMING FAST at the time. Some BBS systems were designed to accommodate that and it made swapping disk images with friends much easier.
