inverting a gear wheel?

NBLM

Hello, just want to ask if anyone knows a quick method to invert a mesh in 3ds max. With inverting I'm not only mean to flip the surface inside but also to flip the geometry that is facing outside to the inside. So that you get a negative form from your model ?

Is there a secret modifier that can handle this for me ?

This is the model I want to invert:

thx

Olli.

well the only way i can think of doing it would be to bake the displacement in to a heightmap, invert that in photoshop and then displace a new cylinder with the new map.

quite honestly what you should have done from the start was to begin with a flat plane, do your stuff on that and then use the bend modifier to make it in a circle. its really the easiest and best way to make cylindrical objects and its super easy to edit.

Elyaradine

With that specific one, as a quickfix, I'd look at selecting the outer verts, and scaling them in and just eyeballing it. I can't think of anything that'd work in general.

AlexLeighton

Yeah I don't think there's a modifier that can do what you want. Basically the easiest thing to do is to remember how far out you extruded/beveled the teeth (or measure it) and then create a copy and extrude it inwards by negative the amount. Then you could grab all the faces and flip the normals if that's what you're going for.

Mark Dygert

I'm not really sure what end result you are picturing so this may or may not apply...

- Select the tops of the gear teeth (using angle select, or the graphite modeling tools select outer)
- Set the gizmo to "use selection center"
- Scale them negatively toward the center until its inverted.

Or if you meant make the valleys hills and the hills valleys.
- Angle select the valleys and scale them outward until they match the hills, then scale the old hills in until they become valleys.
If you have to be precise click on a hill edge and click convert to shape, this will give you a spline you can use as a guide and possibly even snap to.

NBLM

Thanks @all, doing it with a flat plane and the bend modifier was really the easiest way. All I have to do was to type in -360° instead of 360°, done