This is a great challenge and covers a lot of very important skills that are needed for advanced modeling techniques. It might look simple, but it is harder than you think.
- Combine Polygons
- Extrude Edge Attributes
- Append Polygon Tool vs Bridge Tool
- One sided Light vs. Two Sided Light
- Normals
- Soft Edges vs Hard Edges
- Activate Poly Count Heads up Display
- Show Face Centers
- Unlimited Undos (and the consequences)
- Duplicate Face
- Merge Vertices
- Paint Select (b + MMB)
- Move Pivot Point (Insert Key)
- Snap (Vertex, Edge, & Grid) (V, C, X plus MMB)
- Bevel (Fractional vs Absolute)
Create a cube with 10 X 10 X 10 divisions
Create a cylinder Scale it 0.5 X 0.5 X 0.5
Change radius to 0.5
Subdivisions Axis to 24
Subdivisions Height to 10
Show Face Centers
Delete the centers faces leaving along the perimeter
Delete Caps on the Cylinder
Turn off Two Sided Lighting
Reverse Normals on cylinder
Extrude Cylinder’s edge at the Local Translate Z to –0.025 units on both the top and bottom. **Or in the positive direction if have not reversed your Normals yet.
Combine both objects
Using the Append Polygon Tool, Append 1 edge from the cylinder to the aligned edge of the cube.
Double click on one of the inner edges, the whole inner loop will be selected, de-select the two edges on the appended face and then Bridge the two edges with zero divisions. Repeat on the other side.
Select the center faces and extrude them out using a global extrude.
Scale all the outer faces flat
Snap the faces to the edge of the cube
Delete faces of both the extrusion and the cube
Using the snap features, vertex and edge, snap the edges to the extruded hole.
Merge Vertices
Create a cylinder, same as the last except change the Height to 0.5 and the Height Divisions to 5.
Create a cylinder Scale it 0.5 X 0.5 X 0.5
Change radius to 0.5
Change Height to 0.5
Change Subdivisions Axis to 24
Change Subdivisions Height to 5
Duplicate Faces
Merge vertices
Bevel all “true” edges, not face edges using a consistent bevel
Here is the final project.
