Say I have a shape that I want to put a grill over, something like an engine outlet, air intake, etc, and it's not perfectly flat. How's the best way to make grill or grid to form for it?
i would know how to do this in sketchup, but even then it could be difficult. in any 3d program you could cover the opening with a surface of whatever curvature is needed then apply a texture of a grid or grill to that surface with the spaces in between struts being alpha transparent.
First approach that occurs to me is to create an object that corresponds to where you want the gridlines to use as a boolean intersect. Then, split off the piece of your object that you want covered by the grill. Add the boolean modifier on the split object and the gridline boolean object, apply the modifier, then move the resulting object up off the surface. Finally, selected the outer edges of this object and extrude them down into your original object to give it dimensionality.
Edit: Another approach, depending on how form-fitting you want it to be and the geometric detail in your initial grill object, is to use Blender's snap-to-face functionality, which will snap the current mesh onto the mesh "behind" it in the viewport.
Posts
Edit: Another approach, depending on how form-fitting you want it to be and the geometric detail in your initial grill object, is to use Blender's snap-to-face functionality, which will snap the current mesh onto the mesh "behind" it in the viewport.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog