Creating Holes in Mesh

[Joshflighter]

What about a tut on how to model?

[paladin]

boolean only works well with sealed forms and clean meshes. don't use boolean otherwise because it creates double edges and double polies.

I was gonna say, Boolean works just as well in certain cases. Nice tut.

[Malloy]

I dont use Boolean because i dont understand it. I used to use it, but it'd transform my whole geometry into an editable mesh and i'd have to change to editable poly then highlight all verts and weld because it'd detach verts for some reason. So yah i use the first posts method for convenience sake.

[paladin]

thats because you have messy triangles

[Malloy]

probably way back when :P.

I try to model in quads these days

[mR_r0b0to]

i use detach face then boolean, just reconstructing f'd faces right after
seems to be the same amount of work, preference really

also: im a clean-mesh person

[rossmum]

Awesome tutorial. Never occurred to me to use quickslice, go figure

[ejburke]

In Maya, there are snap align tools (1-Point, 2-Point, 3-Point) that make this sort of thing super-easy and precise. Not sure if Max has an analogous tool, but you may want to look around for something similar. Maybe a plug-in or something.

In this example, I would combine all the cylinders into an object, just as you did. But instead of quickslice (Cut Face Tool in Maya), I would select 3 adjacent vertices from one end of one of the cylinders (representing the plane I'm trying to align) and then 3 of the 4 vertices that comprise the empty rectangle. Then I'd run the 3-Point Snap Align tool to perfectly align the multi-cylinder object to the main object.

This gives you unskewed circles that are perfectly in-line with whatever arbitrarily oriented flat surface you need to poke holes into. Although, I would advise people to only make simple indentations like holes when it's absolutely necessary. If the effect you're trying to achieve can be done via texture/bump/normal/displacement and doesn't change the contour of your model, don't bother modelling it in unless you're using Mudbox or Z-brush.