Cutting holes in rounded shape

StormTheGates

Hi guys. I'm working on a model of an A34 Comet (British late WW2 tank) for my portfolio which I would like to create as a next gen games asset. I'm just working on the high poly mesh at the moment and I've hit a bit of a sticking point. I'm trying to make the end of the main gun barrel but I'm having a lot of trouble cutting a pair of clean holes through a rounded cylindrical shape like that. I'm working on one half of it with a Symmetry modifier applied.

I can't seem to get it without it looking really messy, or edge points of the circles sort of sticking out.

Can anyone talk me through the best way of cutting perfect circles through a shape like this with Turbosmooth applied?

Hopefully the reference photo of the end of the barrel and the screenshot of my starting point have attached to this post successfully.

Thanks in advance!

StormTheGates

Cool, thanks for the advice and the link guys. Probably should have gone looking for that myself. Done a couple of long shifts at my new job and now working on my portfolio in what's left of my evening has frazzled my brain a bit.

StormTheGates

Hah yeah I know what you mean, I've generally found Booleans to provide very messy results so I guess it's put me off using them.

StormTheGates

Cool, thanks for the demonstration! That's a big help, I can definitely make that topology. I've not actually made a low poly model, applied turbosmooth, edited it and then applied turbosmooth again yet, always just made the low poly with one pass of turbosmooth. Hurrah for learning!

Bubba91873

Grab the 3ds max script holeytube made by jokermartini.
heres a video and dl link for it.
http://vimeo.com/69252424

Lazerus Reborn

perna wrote: »

Well, I'm posting way too much lately, so why not keep it up. Made a couple mistakes here but the result is ok:

1-lowpoly cage ensures smooth curves
2-adjust subd and cylinder segments to line up as well as possible
3-boolean
4-join verts and space out some of them by using a script that aligns verts on a loop at equal distances. I believe there's a few scripts out there like this, might be in graphite tools too. Can do it manually by moving verts a bit with "constrain to edge" turned on
5- symmetry modifiers make the whole from the quarter, shell modifier gives thickness and meshSmooth rounds it off

"IMG"

Gotta say perna, you're a stand up chap. Seen your help posts everywhere these days. Keep up the hard work

cptSwing

Clean, concise, to the point. Chapeau.

Mark Dygert

perna wrote: »

...or you can just use booleans, which do all that stuff in one automated step and lets you use any geometry

Storm: this thread routinely deals with such questions

ProBooleans in max removes a lot of the headache that people had with booleans. It calculates the best topology based on the operators that are added, which means making cuts on top of cuts won't keep creating horrifically fractured triangulated nightmares like it once did, it figures that out after everything is added and adjusted. It can be switched to quad output which is great.

Or you can do something like this...

Pabs

nice tip mark, thx

Mark Dygert

It works pretty well when you have 4 evenly sized quads. Getting it to cut a perfect hole on a cylinder with denser sides could be problematic.

I'd probably just do it with ProBoleans and symmetry like Perna did. If its high poly and being baked down I might not even clean it up all that much as long as it looks good smoothed.

StormTheGates

Thanks everyone! You guys are awesome. I'll let you know if my portfolio pays off and I get an artist position any time soon