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Go to the Create menu and create a polygon pipe. Make sure that interactive creation is turned off. Create a pipe using the options box and set the number of sections to 8. This will create a unit pipe at the origin. Now go in component mode and delete the side faces and bottom faces of the pipe so you are only left with the top. This will be a 8 section loop. Turn on grid snapping and snap the loop to 0 in the Y axis. Now you have a hole template that will work on your face. I don’t know how your side is oriented but if you are up and down than simply put a 90 degree rotation on the loop so you can place it to the face. Here is the tricky part, you need to make sure the face of your loop is exactly on the exact same plane as the face of the side of your ship. You need to adjust the side of your ship so it is on grid or you need to set your snapping to vertex when you snap your loop. You will see that the outside of your loop has 8 edges. If you look at a block of 4 quads with a common center vertex you see that on the outside of the 4 quads there are exactly 8 edges. You want your loop placed on the centerpoint of 4 quads and you want the outside diameter of the loop to be smaller than the smallest X or Y dimension of your 4 quads. You place the loop at the center (vertex snapped) and now combine the loop mesh with the side of your ship mesh. Take the 4 quads under the loop and delete those faces. Now bridge the edges of the loop with the 8 edges of the rectangular or square hole left by deleting the 4 quads. When you do this and hit the 3 key, you will see when it smooths, you get an exact hole with no tearing.
A few other notes on this. If you have a thickness to your side then you probably want to duplicate your loop in place so you can snap it to the back. Since your loop was facing up when you duplicated it, you need to select all the faces on your copy and go to the Normal menu and reverse the normals on the copy of the loop you made for the back. Once you do this and you attach your loop to your back face, you can then bridge the inside edges of the hole from the front to the back loops. Because you reversed the normals on the back loop you should not have any problems doing this.
If you are making something with a lot of holes of various sizes, you make want to construct a series of loops in multiples of say 8, 12, 16 and 24 sides. For a very large hole, relative to all of your other geometry, you will want more sides so that it smooths properly.
In some other 3D programs such as Modo, you can actually keep a library of modeling elements such as loops and simply drag them into your scene for things like this. There is probably an easy way in Maya to do this but I’ve not looked into it.
Good luck with your project.
"Yesterday is History, Tomorrow a Mystery, Today is a Gift, Thats why it’s called the Present”
Kung Fu Panda
Maya 2012, PFMatchit, Nuke, Modo 501, CS5
Win 7 Pro 64bit
i7 x980 3.3Ghz, 24Gb Ram
Quadro FX3800 Driver 8.17.12.5896
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