Hey there!
I try to model a shampoo bottle. The problem is that the bottle has a cut in the lid. Unfortunately the cut goes against the edge of my model. So I tried to use Blender’s knife tool but it didn’t work well. Also sculpting went totally wrong. All I’ve tried made a good cut but the surrounding looked totally aweful.
Is there an easy way to model such cuts into perfect industry-made materials?
Thank you and sorry for my bad english.
Leon
Hi, which cut is bad? The one for the finger to lift the lid? The one so the lid can open / seperate? The one flowing from the container and tapering into the lid?
Depending on which you are trying to model I’d try Carver MT, Boolean (Modifier or in Edit Mode), Bisect Tool etc.
If it is the flowing line you might get away with a simple Boolean modifier. Just model an appropriate shape. Depending on how it looks you may be able to just leave the modifier ‘live’. Otherwise there will be a lot of cleanup needed after applying it which you could mitigate by having the geometry matching well between the lid and the boolean object
This is what I‘m looking for. I‘ll try it later and show you the result.
Thanks a lot.
It looks to me like John’s pic is actually the wrong shape. The original is not a cut, it’s a one-sided extrusion.
There is nothing you can do to make this easily. Good modelling and good topology are essential for shapes like this.
Having looked again at the reference photo I think you are correct Piotr.
Booleans might still help you get halfway there. I had a quick attempt but the underlying topology is still not great even after a bit of clean up and moving things around. I used a boolean shape to split the lid mesh, then added in some supporting edges along both sides of the cuts, as well as merging near miss vertices and sliding things around. The one sided extrusion, which also tapers towards the top was done using connected mode proportional editing before the two half were connected back together again.
If booleans make a bad mesh, I would draw the slice as a section through the bottle where the lid joins the bottle, duplicate this slice, and loft one up and one down to form the lid and bottle respectively. Then, using regular non-linear loft techniques, taper and steer the ‘grooves’ as required.
I tried again as @JohnMalcolm1970 suggested. However it won’t look that good as you can see on the picture.
I also enclosed the .blend file [v2.8]. Probably someone could help me with that better.
Thank you.
I’m going to have another look at this tonight after I get back from work. It’s an interesting shape.
That would be awesome!
I also tried it with Texture painting and a displacement modifire but the fade of the cut to the left and right, still don’t go that well.
Again I tried it with the texture. It is not perfect and cheating but you have easy adjusting later on. If you have to move the cut or change the curvature of it, it is way easy than adjusting each vertice.
If someone still has a better or the same looking result with a totally modelled mesh, I am still interested in doing it the right way.
Best regards,
Leon
This is as close as I could get it before I gave up. It might give you an idea or two. It’s a 2.8 .blend file, so you’ll have to Append the objects rather than just open the file if you are using 2.79
There’s some nasty topology going on in there, but I’m not fussy about these things 
SHAMPOO.blend (1.0 MB)
This is also pretty close.
Funny how such a simple cut, could waste hours of time. 
Thanks a lot.
