How to add many evenly spaced holes throughout curved surface?

So I’m trying to recreate a few chairs and tables with the same design. Essentially the design has evenly spaced small holes throughout the backing of the chair. I know how to create evenly spaced holes in the table because it’s a flat surface but for the chair it’s quite curved which provides challenges especially with even distribution. Luckily I was able to find a SketchUp file of the chair without the holes but no matter what I try I can’t solve the evenly spaced problem. I have attached a photo of the actual chair and my sketchup file if anyone can provide some suggestions.Chair.skp (1.0 MB)

Are you ruling out using seamless texture mesh? That’s what I’d do to keep the geometry count low. See example:

1 Like

I’ve actually created a version using a very similar texture. Only problem is that eventually I will be using this model in V-Ray to render a scene and models with semi-transparent textures don’t render well.

Do you have a chair model that you’re working with currently? I also use VRAY and would be curious to try it with various maps applied to see what level of quality is achievable.

Cheair.skp (1.4 MB)
This is the chair I’m working with currently. I’ve used a couple of textures on vismats but cant find a good one because the colours are never close enough to the actual chair colour. I also don’t know enough about customizing textures.

That texture pattern could be part of an alpha channel and the holes would be rendered as holes.

sketch uv is a good plugin for textures.

also in conjunction with roadkill.

I’ll have to look into making an alpha channel, it’s not something I’ve done before. Those tutorials look helpful, although intense!

So firstly, for the color issues, you can use the ‘color overlay’ layer style in Photoshop to easily adjust colors of your mesh then just save as png and reload with previous texture.

Secondly, for rendering, the texture that was in your model for some reason wouldn’t render the transparency. The new texture I added did. Didn’t look that far into it but there’s something wrong with that particular image (for me anyway). Seems to render the transparency fine after swapping out.

As for the UV, I don’t have fancy UV tools like WrapR (and couldn’t use it anyway as I’m on a Mac. For this text, I set the copied the mesh 3 times and rotated for front, bottom and sides and made sure texture was set to ‘projected’. You can see some warping at the very corner where the sides and backs come together so could do one more projection at 45 degrees to fix that spot.

Hope this helps.

2 Likes