Cutting holes in things

[ub3rman123]

A tower I'm making is intended to have narrow window-slit type things in the sides of it, at certain intervals. My current method of making these is to do a loop cut 4 times on the face I want it to be on, extruding the center face inwards, then merging some of the vertices around it to lower poly count a tiny bit. Is there a more efficient method to do this or am I stuck with that?

 

Here's an image I'm basing the tower off, in case that happens to help at all in what I'm trying to do.

 

http://jonsullivan.com/images/ireland/it-kilalla-bg.jpg

 

[throttlekitty]

You've got it. You could also try booleans, but often the cleanup on that isn't worth the time.

[alonsomartinez]

Have you tried subdivide the face and then delete the unwanted faces?

[ub3rman123]

How do I do that? W>Specials, then merge excess vertices?

[Alecu]

The shape that you are trying to cut a hole through is quite delicate because it is a curved surface and so the hole must be curved too exactly as the tower.

Here's a tutorial here describing what you are trying to do:

tutorial

You can make the shape of the windows by combining a simple circle with a plane.

I may be wrong there,I'm not that experienced but experimenting with things is also part of the fun.

Check cookie cut too,but I didn't find it so useful with what I have done so far.

 

Also I don't think blender's booleans will work. They will most likely horribly distort the mesh. They only work well on basic shapes,which must be also closed.

[ziitch]

I've done the Boolean way, and I would only suggest it if what you're trying to do is simple in design - Here's a result of cutting a pattern into an earring:

 

http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/7033/pirateh.png

 

Note the poor face handling, and I did have to do some vertices cleaning - For the tower, I'd suggest starting with a low-poly cylinder (8~12 sides) and cut out the basic window shapes first, then do subdivision and smoothing.

[MangaLou]

Wow an old topic, Is anyone still checking this, anyway...

 

Why not create the holes first, and extrude the rest, the model will be clean and there should be no extra vertices or ugly faces.