Cineversity

Hello,
I need to make a perforated sphere, I achieved it with a texture, but now I need to fly into it, so it needs to have geometry.
I tried using Mograph and Boolean and it crashes every time. Would you recommend any other technique?

Thanks!

Hi beauclair,

These amounts of holes certainly test your hardware. OF course if you can exclude this, please contact the support, as crashes are not tolerated ;o)
http://www.maxon.net/support/support-questions.html

If the Boole works initially, make it editable.

The amount of data produced to have (I assume) just one hole where the camera flies through seems not very economic. My initial thought was to have not a single hole, but a bump or perhaps a displacement (SPD) for that.
While on the outside, the texture suggests a surface with holes (dents) in it, after the flight through, the surface is set up in the same way, but the bump and/or displacement map produce the dent then from the inside. A transparency map helps to convey the effect. Perhaps for the single fly through whole, you might create a detailed hole, eventually with some “neighbors” around it in a similar quality. This will be then composed in, e.g., After Effects. Also composed the inside and outside, but maybe you try a front and back projection of the texture to get the results at once.
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Typically I would take the sphere apart and create a “slice” or triangle kind of shape. Prepare all the holes for that segment and have it as static model (compared to an active Boole), then clone it to get a complete sphere back. The seams are the real problem. I think of a sphere like an Icosahedron set to 8 or less segments (or a Platonic Object directly)—for example
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Speaking of the Icosahedron Sphere setting, which I think comes the closest to a nice distribution of the triangles. How about using a plug-in? Which I do not tech-support here! Nitro-Fit from Nitro4d.com. This could use one triangle object with a single hole and “map” it to the geometry. Not tested nor checked for this.

I hope one of the three options might work for you. All of that is just brainstorming, as I have no idea of you camera movement, and how much motion blur is involved. There are too many un-known parts that I left it here on a consultant/brainstorming level.

Perhaps you fill in more information, as “fly into it” is not really creating a precise “picture” here for me. I certainly like to explore it—just supply more data.

All the best

I had initially achieved this with the texture, but wanted to go further and create actual geometry. I will try to create a section and repeat it, thanks for the tip!
By flying in, I meant, the camera will come out of the structure through one of the holes.
We’re on Cinema 15 by the way.

Thanks again.

I built a small section and repeated it, worked great! Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback, beauclair! (I write normally the name as given in the profile, let me know if that is OK)

Sounds great, I hope you get what you like.

I tested some ways, as this is certainly not an easy task to do fast and “clean”. So far I have not found a quick “procedural” as discussed in the series “Industrial Holes”.
One of my trial and errors… checking out how the Spherify or Wrap could support this. I will certainly share it when I find something “quick and easy”

My best wishes

P.S.:

One idea.

I wanted to first make certain that the holes to the poles become not stretched. So I created a Null rotation that slowly progresses and then slowly stops. The F-curve designs the distribution or the distance of each segment to each other.

This is then used by the Tracer to create a Spline with a specific distribution of points. I se the Playback to single, so it stops at the end and I can “harvest” the spline Make a copy of the Tracer editable). Each frame creates a vertice/point.

With the Lathe Object I create a segment.

As explained in the “Industrial Holes”, I made a quick selection with a Plane object and copied the selection to the Segment.

I created an Extrude Inner [M~W] in that selection and deleted the selection after it.

With a Cloner Object, I created a sphere out of the segments, made it editable (Object Manager>Objects>Connect and Delete) and used the optimize function to eliminate double points.

To have a clean result I Align the Normals and use the Extrude tool [M~T] with Attribute Manager Options Create Caps on—one time (other wise you get weird polygons with Caps on).

All steps top to bottom are in the file.

You might adjust values to your liking.

All the best

I tried to get a sphere with relatively equal square space, to replace the polygons with a little square+hole as mentioned above with the NitroFit plug in. Yes I try normally to do everything native, but this delivers something I missed since ever. As it is quite affordable, I gave it a shot here. If it would be a project of mine, I might have tweaked the areas more. Note: that I use here the Spherify to keep the points in place, in that way I can pull points around with out care—but they stay on the sphere surface. I used this to model JET for my movie. It is fast and efficient. Use after this the “Current State To Object” command to get out of the Spherify mode.

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