Need help putting a hole in a gear.

[tkier]

I am having a difficulty putting a hole in a gear. I created a gear object using the gear function and now I want to bore our a hole in the center of the gear along along the z axis. I have tried using the drill tool, drill solid, and booleans. All give very strange results.

I am still learning LightWave so there is probably something obvious that I am missing. Any suggestions? I have attached the gear object, if anybody wants to play with it.

Thanks
Tom

[Mylenium]

Hey man,

You created ambiguous geometry (= the 2 big polygons are not flat and thus not mathematically usable)! You cannot scale the teeth without separating them properly from those large side polygons. If you need such geometry, do the following:

a) Create a cylinder. The number of sides is double the number of teeth.

b) Use the bevel tool on every second side polygon. Adjust as needed to get tapered teeth.

c) Scale the points of the teeth to adjust their width!

Voila! Now you have usable geometry. You will be easily able to use any boolean or drill on the 2 big polys (which were originally the cylinders top and bottom).

Mylenium

[tkier]

Thanks for the reply. I will give that a try.

To bad that the gear function does not create geometry that makes this usable.

Thanks again,
Tom

[CoryC]

You just want to put a simple ol' hole in the middle of a gear created by the Gear button correct? There is a simple wat to do this. In another layer create a cylinder the size and location of where you want the hole to be. When that is done, put the gear in the foreground and the cylinder in the background. Hit Shift-b to bring up Boolean. Select subtract and hit 'OK'. You should now have a gear with a hole in it. Your large face polys may look like they have disappeared. They sometimes flip inside out. Select any poly that is facing the wrong way and hit 'f' to Flip them back. One last thing to do. Merge (m key) with setting at automatic to remove extra points. Boolean likes to add unneeded points.

[richpr]

What may help is to triple the faces that you are going to boolean into...

And finally on the gear, select the faces which will have the hole in it, before you boolean... this speeds up the boolean, since it only checks the selected faces to be cut, not the whole object...

If you select, make sure you select the front and the back of the gear... or else it will but only on the side you selected...