How do you create circular indents on to spherical surface?

[Anonymous]

Hello All,

I’m having a hard time figuring out to add a circular indent on my character’s head and am completely lost on how to do so. I thought about using a nurbs circle and projecting it onto the side of the sphere but that just made things overly complicated and hard to clean up.

Any ideas or YouTube tutorials would be awesome, 

Thanks,

[ray]

A simple way could be to move the points to obtain a circular shape and then extrude them inside. 

[Anonymous]

I tried using the circular lines at the poles of the sphere but it just came out looking like a straight line cutting through instead of a more circular indentation. I’m trying to preserve the curvature of the line on the surface but can’t seem to figure it out.

Best example would be the circular lines on the BB8 unit from start wars. 

[pshwayka · Accepted solution]

If you can afford the poly count,  do a mesh->smooth on the sphere  with just 1 division level, and create a pipe object (and also apply 1 division level) then do a Boolean->Difference operation. (Select the sphere, then the pipe when you do this.) Attached is the setup and the result. If you end up with a couple of stray edges on the sphere, just select them and do an edit mesh->delete edge/vertex.

[Anonymous]

Awesome, so far this has been the closet I’ve come to being able to achieve that style of indentation, however what if I wanted to stay low poly?

[pshwayka]

I don't know of a way to do that with a lower poly count without using something like a normal map...which probably wouldn't give you a similar quality result.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the help! Much appreciated.