Hi Blender users,
First off, sorry if this I’m posting this in the wrong section.
I want to make a hollow sphere whose surface is made of hexagons and I want to be able to animate each individual hexagon moving away/towards the center of the sphere.
Any advice on getting started with this would be appreciated
You can’t make a sphere with only hexagons, you’d have some pentagons as well, just like a football
Once you have your object split each hexagon by selecting all their outside edges and make them as sharp (Ctrl+E / Make Sharp). The add an Edge Split Modifier and apply it. Each hexagons will be separated from the rest of the models. Them make them each their own object by selecting all in edit mode and press P / Sepaarte by Loose parts. This will make animating each face easier. You can then set the transform orientation to ‘normal’ so you can move them along their normal direction. This will be towards and away from the original sphere centre. Then just keyframe the location of the face with shortcut I
Is there a way to move all faces a certain distance along the normal at once? After separating by loose parts I have over 400 faces so moving them all would be very tedious.
For one object with separated faces:
Set pivot point to Individual Origins and transform orientation to Normal. The move along the normal z axis with G Z Z
For individual objects enable Manipulate Center Points and scale the selected objects with S. The Pivot point is the median point
When I tried your method for the separate objects, each of the individual faces are also scaled as they move further apart, so it just looks like the entire sphere is growing larger. Was there a setting I missed?
Supply a link to your blend file so we can see
Each object needs to have its origin at its centre
Select each object and use the ‘Set Origin’ option
Then enable the ‘manipulate center points’ option as indicated previously
Thank you. I got the faces to separate, but now I can’t seem to move each face normal to the original center, even after setting the transform orientation to normal.
hexsphere5.blend (1.33 MB)
