3ds max circle grate, ideas for soloution?

Revada

Usually I would brute force a problem like this by editing each object till they worked. Instead i thought it was time to improve my work flow and ask you guys what might be the best solution.

Basically i want the grate to fit within the Air duck.
I was thinking maybe a booleans.

The grate is just made of cylinder currently set as instanced objects so i can tweak.

(Sorry for the large image)

Any help would be awesome.

MoP

I would probably use an FFD modifier. One on the vertical bits and a seperate one on the horizontal bits. 4 segments across should be enough.
If your grating mesh is already merged this will be slightly more fiddly (you'd have to select all the horizontal/vertical sections together).

A boolean should work too but I usually leave those as a last resort as it can get messy.

Depending on what this is for, you can always just mask 'em out with a material with tweaked radial gradient in the Opacity slot

Revada

Worked like a charm.

Cheers

cptSwing

Quickslice tool?

Kbrom12

I was going to recommend quickslice then deleting whatever ya don't want

Ghostscape

I would also have merged all the cylinders and quicksliced away the parts I didn't want.

McGreed

I think the FFD modifier is a better option, because its non-destructive and if he change the size of the circle, he can easy adjust it to the new size. And its possible to use it for something else, without having to redo some of the mesh. But of course, it does depend if the vertical and horizontal meshes are merges together.