Watertight holes.

Support Modeling
1

Hi, I’m trying to produce a grid of offset six sided holes. Eventually I hope to have this 3d printed. I don’t feel like I’m doing this the right way, I started with a 4 sided plane that I Boolean differences with a 6 sided cylinder, and then I took that and duplicated it side by side a bunch of times and then Boolean differenced that. Eventually this became very intensive and I ended up with a lot of none manifold edges (easily 100+) as you can see in my image. I don’t know a whole lot about Blender, so any advice would help. It seems like I could write a script that could generate such a grid for me, because ideally, I’m looking to make small holes and a lot of them (1364) but I don’t know where I would even start. Any pushes in the right direction would be helpful!

2

here is a way of doing it using the array modifier, note that you have to give an object offset rather than a relative offset (since is a 60º repetition).

EDIT: Forgot the blend :o, in the 2º layer, a more worked version

Attachments

Array meth.jpg1024×775 56.2 KB

Waterholes.blend (143 KB)

3

Exactly what I needed to know! I’m having a hard time seeing what you did with the array modifier because I can’t split the view in the file you gave me, I right click on the window seems and I get nothing? Regardless, thank you. Helps me a lot.

Edit: Ah, I’ve opened it in 2.5 alpha 1 and figured it all out, guess I have to learn the interface all over again. Sigh.