cutting neat holes in mesh's?

[matsta]

hey guys

its been a while since ive been active on the forums. just got my new rig last week and ive been out of town getting it sorted and having some fun before i get back to work. ive been looking through both this and the deviantart gallery lately in search of some inspiration. while doing this i realised that i lacked one of the most basic skillz in blender, how to cut a neat hole (any shape) into a mesh. ie a window in the shape of a star cut into the side of a circular house. i thought of just using the vert selection tool and just clicking my way. this worked but not very satisfied with the result. also thing like cutting perfect circles gets me every time. i have no idea how. could anyone point me in the direction of any good tutorials.

would be greatly apreciated!
greetz
mat

[dougal2]

use the boolean modifier.

you need
a) the mesh that needs a hole
b) a mesh that is the shape of the hole

apply the modifier to (a) and enter the name of (b) in the "Ob:" field.

The two meshes obviously have to intersect.

blender can actually makea bit of a mess of the faces using this method, but it does at least work.
(i tend to find myself "apply"ing the modifier, and then re-facing the mesh by hand in a tidier fashion).

[Kram1032]

boolean in blender is very weird...
I guess, retopo is great, for this to refine

[matsta]

thanks alot! off on holiday now will give it a bash when i get back.

greetz
mat

[boweeb007]

This was posted not too long ago at BlenderNation:
http://www.blendernation.com/2006/09/18 ... your-mesh/

I hope that helps. BlenderNation is extremely recommended. They have an RSS feed set up for their daily posts, too.

A note on applying the modifier - you should know that boolean operations don't have to be done by modifier. If you press W for the boolean menu (in object mode) notice that there's a separation between the mod and operation. I just wanted to clarify that in case it saves you an extra step.

[5OnIt]

Thanks for the link boweeb! Learned a few new tricks!

[StompinTom]

for circular holes in smooth walls, subsurfing is your best friend. make a low poly mesh with a square hole, then subsurf the shit out of it. works for simple stuff.

[Kram1032]

SubSurf is great, but a sqare WONT be a circle
It will be smooth-edged but NOT circular

The more edges you use for an imperfect circle, the perfecter the final cicle will look

[F.ip2]

blender booleans are very bad. they work great with simple objects and are useless with semi complex/dense objetcs.

i would rather pre-think the object and model boolean interactions on your own.

[mrCarnivore]

SubSurf is great, but a sqare WONT be a circle
It will be smooth-edged but NOT circular

It will be at least really cose to a circle. I used to use this feature all the time... I try to not use subsurf nowadays, though, because the polycount goes up really quickly, although the subsurfing is only useful in parts of most meshes. If you have some blender experience it is far more effective if you model everthing yourself.

At least for technical renders. For organic stuff the subsurfing might still be very useful...