topic Re: Creating a hole pattern in Maya Modeling Forum

Creating a hole pattern?

Anonymous — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 17:10:44 GMT

Hi,

I am fairly new to maya, and I have seen a lot of 3D printed models that have a hole pattern to them, but apart from just using booleans and guessing with the scale tool, is there any way to do this?

ex this

http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/papers/rp2/Pictures/KleinBottle.gif

to this

http://www.tinkerine.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/klein60.jpg

Re: Creating a hole pattern

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Oct 2014 10:49:01 GMT

Hhhmmm...well...I think this one falls under the idea that for any one thing you want to do in Maya, there's usually 10 different ways to do it (LOL).

Booleans would certainly be one way, however while I don't actually have any 3D printing experience, I would strongly suspect that you'd have to do a tremendous amount of clean up using Booleans for a project like that. Try taking a simple cube for example and cut a cylindrical or spheracle hole in it (using Booleans) without cleaning up the edges, then smooth it and see what happens to the geometry...I suspect it would likely the something similar with a 3D print.

Now that said, while I'm no expert myself, as an experiment try creating a basic poly sphear, bump the mesh up to around 40 by 40 and simply delete alternating faces. I think in this case (and this is a bit of a guess) that if you created the shape of that object (or something similar) with enough geometry and simply deleted the faces where the holes are, remembering to use edge loops and such to keep your holes intact and in place, you could probably get close to that.

As with so many things in Maya, from a beginner's stand point at least, you're probably gonna have to play with this one quite a bit. Hopefully someone more experience will come along, but I think that's where I'd start.

Hope this helps and good luck!

Re: Creating a hole pattern

Calebos — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 14:12:08 GMT

Make the whole shape, then select all faces of an object and extrude them with option Keep Faces Together Off with decrease of local scale(Maya will create from each face smaller one) and with inside faces still selected delete them. Then select all faces again, turn On Keep Faces Together and extrude it again to make thickness of the final shape. Then try to look at the geometry smoothed(just hit the "3" button with geometry selected). Keep history on so you can change the extrude length change afterwards.

Re: Creating a hole pattern

Anonymous — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 14:38:10 GMT

That really helped, thanks!!

Re: Creating a hole pattern

Calebos — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 14:51:53 GMT

You are welcome. Remember the easiest way wins the round all the time 🙂