How to draw a dice with round corners and inward hemispheres as dots

Hi everybody.

I’m drawing some simple objects as hobby, and now I’m trying to draw a dice with the following characteristics:

  • The cube has round corners
  • The dots are inward hemispheres.

This is how it looks so far.

But now I’m having some troubles and I’m open to all sort of recommendations.

I’m going to explain how I’m doing so far and what my questions are:

  1. I made dots as components. (I guess it’s ok, but I like you to confirm).
  2. I transform the cube into a group while I place the dots components and then I ungroup it to be able to intersect faces with the dots.
  3. I think I need some guidelines if I want to place dots equidistant but I’m having trouble because of round corners.
  4. I think I should always work on front view to be easier to place the dots but I’m not sure how to rotate the cube and align it to the origin or change the axes since it has round corners.

This is the file if someone offers to explore it of make some tries.

dice.skp (689.6 KB)

Thanks in advance.

Try turning on hidden geometry in order to create guides.

@MobelDesign, thanks, I will

Here’s a few ideas for you.
Hidden geometry lets you do lots of things.
Components that Glue to any and Cut opening make life real simple.

3 Likes

@Box, that was awesome.

I will try what you both has told me.
I’m still not sure how I will rotate it to work in another face keeping front view, but I will keep trying.

To rotate the dots to the next face, you can use the Rotate / Copy (q + tap Ctrl (or Alt/Opt on Mac) to toggle copy on/off), with a tap on the up arrow key to toggle ‘keep the rotation about the blue axis’.

Or explode a dot and remake it as a component with its blue axis pointing upwards from its circular opening, and make it both Glue to - Any, and Cut Opening before clicking Create component. The blue axis must be perpendicular to the edges you want to use to cut the hole, which must also be in the component’s red-green plane. That is, dot component’s blue pointing outwards from the cube face, from the centre of the dot on that face.

Also, unless you intend to view individual dice at close quarters, you really only need a minimum of 2, and a maximum of 3 or 4 segments of arc per 90° for the cube’s corners, and the dots.

You could also leave rounding over the cube’s corners until after you have placed all the dots.

You could also use Camera/Parallel projection, and Camera/Standard views/Front, Right, Left, Back (and look up from the bottom) to see one face at a time square on. Or flip the cube along Blue and view from the top, to see the bottom face.

PS. Looks from your first image as if the dots may have reversed faces inside them. You want them to be white (normal, not reversed) faces when viewed in monochrome.

Thank you @john_mcclenahan

I have some trouble understanding English because I’m from Spain, so I maybe didn’t understand everything but I try my best.

I finally got the result pretty similar to the one I was looking for.

Instead as rotating the dots, I rotated the cube as you said, I was working always in front view, and yes, I had some troubles because when I tried to do it, the guide lines were moved too, so I hid guide lines temporally to make it easy to select the cube and the dots and rotate all of them, once it’s done I made guide lines visible again but I had another problem, cause of the cube has rounded corners and probably because of that is not well aligned to the axes, so when I rotate the cube I don’t see the guidelines because they’re a very little inward, so I used X-ray view to fix it.

I was using Parallel projection almost all the time, thanks for the tip of advice.

I followed your advice to reverse face of the dots, because you were right, I wanted them to be white.

The file is here is someone is interested.

dice.skp (647.8 KB)

Thank you all :wink:

1 Like

Looking very good and smooth - bravo

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