Sperhical indentations or removing overlap

I am trying to use Blender to make a 3D board. I would like to know if it is possible to carve circular indentations into a cylinder, which would be the board. In essence, I would like to create spherical indentations in the board, which would be where the pieces, which are spheres, would be placed upon. I was thinking somehow the overlap could be deleted from the board or something to that effect, but I do not know how to do that. I am still quite new to 3D modelling so I may not be able to do anything very complicated, but I could try.
This is an image of what I have done so far:
http://img261.imageshack.us/img261/2466/boardqh3.jpg

Any help would be much appreciated.

try joining all of your spheres together as one mesh (ctrl J)
name it something you can remember, like “holes”
then select the mesh you want the cuts to be in and in the modifiers, use booleans
choose the difference boolean
it asks for an object to use, and there, type in exactally what you called the other mesh, in this case, it would be “holes”
and all you need to do from there is apply it

You can try to do model it similar to the holes in my cube/die tutorial (see my signature).

Werner

  • Make the inner shape (the cross - you need one quad/square per indentation) by subdividing ([Ctrl][R]+Scroll wheel … or enter number) a plane and deliting the vertices that are not used for the shape
  • Select the edge of this shape and extrude [E] it (only edges)
  • With the extruded edgeloops still selected do a “To Sphere”->100% transform. ([F9] edit buttons)
  • Follow the dice tutorial on pip-hols for the rest.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/167/439579661_2a74295359_o.png

Werner

Oh and if you want to make the edge of the board to subsurf nicely you can do this:

  • Count the number of vertices that are used in the circle (in my example there are 36)
  • Add a circle on the same plane (snap cursor to selection) with 36 vertices
  • Select the new circle and the old circle
  • Mesh->Scripts->Bridge Faces-Edge-Loops
  • Enjoy

The inner circle is the “extruded” one and the outer circle is the added one:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/165/439653134_bd842617ac_o.png

Werner

Thanks very much for the help! Much appreciated
And quick question, how do you subdivide in the quads? I can only get them into triangles that point into the center. Once again, thanks for the quick response.

I do not model the quads into the circle, I do it the other way around (see my first step-by-step). Then the “border” edges are extruded, scaled and "To Sphere"ed :slight_smile:

Werner