Hello,
Newish to Blender of course.
I’m working on a model I got from an STL file that I’m trying to clean up and make nice for use in Blender. It’s been a nice learning project for me.
One thing I’m stuck on is that things which would be round (primarily screw heads and screw holes are currently square or hexagon). Is there a way to us a modifier or something in order to round those shapes?
Here are some examples.
Thanks!
select the edges, subdivide to your likeing, loop tool (add-on)… circle
Edit: Oh and turn the ngons into tris or quad…
A good tool for what you want is in Edit Mode>Mesh>Transform>To Sphere, or Shift+Alt+S. Just follow these steps:
Base object (square)
Split edges to make circular shape:
Alt+LMB top edges
Shift+Alt+S the top
Repeat 3 and 4 for bottom shape. If the edges end up not being flat after the “To Sphere” function, scale them along the Z-axis to be flat.
Also, importing models tends to result in bad geometries, so perform the “Tris to Quads” (Alt+J) to turn triangles into square shapes you can work with easily. Also, sometimes vertices get duplicated, so go into vertex mode, right-click, go down to Merge Vertices>By Distance.
An addon to help you in what you are doing could be LoopTools. When installed, you can right click, and at the top, there will be a LoopTools option, and just select “Circle”.
What do you recommend for the holes? I haven’t yet gotten into cleaning up vertices ever before so if that needs to happen first before I can modify the actual shape I’ll need to study on that. I’ve been trying to use LoopTools and other things but I’m not finding a way to round out that square hole to be a circle hole.
You should just be able to use the same process as described above, except it’s on the inside of the mesh rather than the outside, as the screws are.
Thanks for the help so far! I started getting it and it’s looking really close! I’m a bit stuck now trying to deal with some weirdness around my edges.
Thanks!
Use a Bevel…
Cube > Select corner edges > Ctrl + B > adjust in dropdown panel Lower L of viewport
Works with a Square Hole as well, but leads to a bunch of added geometry that may not play well with textures…
In this case better to select the surrounding edges and Mesh > Transform > to Sphere
If you subdivide the section you can get a smoother circle…
Subdivided edge around hole…
Bevel on a hole in a solid works but leads to N-Gons that may or may not mess up the textures…It can be cleaned up but you are already trying to clean things up so it just adds to the work…
Awesome, I’m starting to see. I think the trouble I have is really because this was exported geometry and it’s a big mess.
For something like this one,
I can get it round but then I have some of these overlapping faces on the sides that overlap the edges of the circle. I’m guessing I need to clean up around my squares before I try making it into a circle? What is the best way to clean up this really messy mesh? I’ve never gone down that path before so I’m very much a noob there.
Sorry to be spamming this but I’m really learning as I go. Hoping maybe I document something here that will help someone else.
Mesh>Clean Up>Limited Dissolve was perfect for cleaning up all this messy mesh. Putting the Max Angle too high loses definition in the mesh, but really once you hit about 1 degree you got what you needed.
Before
After
