Adding a circle hole to geometry?

gOvi

Often when I create models I find that I need to cut holes in them from time to time or at least dig a circle into the mesh.

I find this comes up quite a bit the more I create models, and I used to use proBoolean in 3ds Max to solve the issue. As most of you probably know that tool results in some ugly geometry(depending). I have found another solution to fix it, but I am not all that pleased with it. Here is an example of what I am talking about:

Normal Box

I convert to editable poly and tessellate the middle to create more verts to work with, which I do not like since that creates 5 sided polys.


(Top View) I then take the verts and scale them appropriately to get as close to a perfect circle as possible.
-Move Verts-


-Close to circle-


With that I extrude downward to create the hole or punch.



So that is my method, and I feel it is really sloppy. I want to know your methods and get some polished results like you would see a screw or nail in a piece of wood.

Thank You in advance!

Alidium

I found this a few days ago.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCtOSllk6mE&feature=player_embedded"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCtOSllk6mE&feature=player_embedded[/ame]#!
Have not needed it in a project yet, but works great in tests.

LMP

To make a perfect circle, it's a good idea to use a cylinder with the number of sides you want and then snap the verts to the cylinder.

BARDLER

LMP wrote: »

To make a perfect circle, it's a good idea to use a cylinder with the number of sides you want and then snap the verts to the cylinder.

That is what I do, or boolean and clean up if the surface is oddly shaped.

passerby

vertex chamfer trick anyone, than apply the spherefiy modifer on the results of it

Sean VanGorder

I put this together a while ago to show another technique that might be useful. It's more geared towards high poly modeling, but you get the idea.

gOvi

Thanks for all the tips guys! I'm not sure when you say snap verts to cylinder, but I do like the results of the turbo smoothed meshes, very clean geometry. This will help me immensely.

Bek

I'm pretty sure what they mean by 'snap verts to cylinder is this':

Draw a cylinder over your mesh where you want the hole to be
turn on snap to vertices
use the cut tool, clicking along the vertices of the cylinder, cutting its shape into your mesh.

That's kinda tedious though. In Modo I'll just use axis stencil or bevel vertices, whichever is quicker. Using stencil with another shape is good because you can easily stencil, then scale the cutting shape up slightly and stencil again for your support loops. Extruding the faces in though is a cool trick, didn't think of doing that.