I’ve been googleing and digging but I’ve really not found a clear answer just how people successfully make nice clean holes in polygon objects.  I’m doing, what I thought, was a simple model of a pocket knife.  It is a military one so it has lots of holes in the side.  I started with a polygon box with as sparse of a mesh that would smooth nicely. I used a boolean difference to punch holes in the side.  I then placed 3 more edge loops inside the holes, and cleaned up by adding triangles.  You can see the mesh screen shots pre/post smoothing as well as a final render.  I’ve been playing around with different tricks with just a box and a cylinder to see if I can get better results but so far everything looks pretty crappy.  Any tips or sage words of advice would certainly be welcome.

"Yesterday is History, Tomorrow a Mystery, Today is a Gift, Thats why it’s called the Present”
Kung Fu Panda

Maya 2013, NukeX, Mari, Modo 601, VueXStream 11, CS6
Win 7 Pro 64bit SP1
i7 x980 3.3Ghz, 24Gb Ram
Quadro K5000 Driver 9.18.13.697

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Have you tried creating a sudbdivision surface object, then subdivide the object evenly with insert edge loop command, cutting the faces where you want the holes to be, crease the edge of the knife so that remains hard, convert the subd into poly and smooth the result? That could do the trick.

Making sure you have good 4 sided polygons is a sure way to be ready to smooth your model later without problems.  Here are a couple links that are for 3ds Max but the concepts are the same.  You want to aim for 4 sided, square shaped polygons.  Not long rectangular or long triangular, if possible.

http://area.autodesk.com/for...esh-after-boolean/page-3/

http://area.autodesk.com/for...sing-boolean-subtraction/

3ds Max 2013, Maya 2013
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit
Core i7, 12GB RAM
Nvidia Quadro FX 3700 (Driver 297.03)

Thanks for all the great comments.  I will try them.  I knew booleans can be a problem, especially in the areas where the meshes do not line up.  Interesting on building the holes with pipes and then combining and building the rest of the mesh around them.  I was thinking about trying that last night but did not get to it.  I’ll try these ideas out and post the results.

"Yesterday is History, Tomorrow a Mystery, Today is a Gift, Thats why it’s called the Present”
Kung Fu Panda

Maya 2013, NukeX, Mari, Modo 601, VueXStream 11, CS6
Win 7 Pro 64bit SP1
i7 x980 3.3Ghz, 24Gb Ram
Quadro K5000 Driver 9.18.13.697

you could just add the holes at the very very end. build your object, apply the smooth mesh then balloon your holes out. this way you would have already have a finished surface that you could put holes in. then just run the clean up object tool.

Cheers and good luck :D

clean up the polygon and then you the split polygon tool to create those nice 4-sided polygons and then use the edge loop tool around edges of the blade and each of holes making sure to get both the inside of the holes and the surrounding area with the edge loops.  this will hold the firm edges when you smooth the polygon
Mark

I was able to make it work by essentially prebuilding holes that were perfectly symmetric and then using bridge, fill hole and cut polygon tools to build the mesh around the holes.  Looks like a bit of a hack but it works.  I’m finding that bridging and cut polygon tools can leave dangling vertices as well as create holes at vertex locations when I am not careful.  I’m sure all of you well seasoned modelers have seen this.  I have to work with it a little to figure out how to build piece meal meshes up and not shoot myself in the foot in the process of doing it.  I’ll try the other idea of using cut polygon to straighten out the mesh around the holes.  That is probably simpler and cleaner in the long run.  Here are a few shots of what the mesh looks like with prebuilt holes inserted.

"Yesterday is History, Tomorrow a Mystery, Today is a Gift, Thats why it’s called the Present”
Kung Fu Panda

Maya 2013, NukeX, Mari, Modo 601, VueXStream 11, CS6
Win 7 Pro 64bit SP1
i7 x980 3.3Ghz, 24Gb Ram
Quadro K5000 Driver 9.18.13.697

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I am a max user and don’t know anything in Maya, but here is how to do it in Max, it could be similar to maya.

Draw the profile of the object you want to make with a spline, create circle splines(which will act as your holes), attach them together(make them one object) then extrude the mesh...In max, you add a modifier called “Extrude” then the spline will become extruded into 3D…

Hope this helps ^^

Application: 3Ds Max 2010
GPU: ATI HD6970
RAM: 8GB
OS: Windows 7 64-bit
DX: 11
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I’m having the same problem expect I’m trying to make a tattoo gun piece can someone help me out ?

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I didn’t use any reference image for this so the curveature is all messed up in my images, but here is a process that will result in all quads:

3ds Max 2013, Maya 2013
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit
Core i7, 12GB RAM
Nvidia Quadro FX 3700 (Driver 297.03)

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It’s hard to tell from the image, but if you look closely at the full size image, you can see that I have edge loops added in those areas.

3ds Max 2013, Maya 2013
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit
Core i7, 12GB RAM
Nvidia Quadro FX 3700 (Driver 297.03)