The first thing I'm going to fix are the corners of the walls. Because the extruded edges earlier was extruded out from the center and I want these to go as a loop throughout the mesh, I use Split Polygon ( Edit Polygons Split Polygon ) to take the edge further and then I delete the old edges going away from the center
Note that you only have to tweek the wall facing your sideView. The other two are going to be deleted later anyways. Check if the mesh looks ok and select the border edges. You can use the Select Border Edges tool to do this. Works like a charm. ( Ctrl + Right-click over the mesh and select it there.) We are going to extrude these edges inwards to create the start of the top of the nut. Just drag the blue arrow after choosing Extrude Edge under Edit Polygons. Merge the three vertices that intersect eachother in the corners. See images below (clickable for larger view).
Click for larger image
Click for larger image
5 - Now we're going to do a little cool trick. It's actually not that cool really, but we'll do it anyways :).
Remember the cylinder we created for additional
reference? Well, select it and set its Subdivision Axis to "18" . " 18/6= 3 " you say "and we have four edges
on each wall? Hmm." Hang in there, we'll make sure
the wall only needs three edges to connect.
Scale it to fit the circle representing where the hole will be. If you skipped the "caging" scale it up to where you think the hole will be and make sure you follow the reference when you set the top and bottom of the cylinder.
Let's go back to the nut for a second.
Delete the top- and bottom walls so you're left with the one facing your sideView. Use "Split Edge Ring Tool" to split it in half vertically. Press "enter" to finish the tool and click "polySplitRing1" under INPUTS in the channel-Box . Scroll all the way down and change the attribute "Weight" from whatever you got to 0.5. Now select the faces on the right side and delete them.
Click for larger image
6 - The smooth proxy will stop updating when we start doing ninjatricks on our mesh in the following steps. You might as well delete it.
Select the two middle edges on the side of the wall and extrude them out a bit. Select the three newly created vertices and scale them in the Z-axis so they allign. Move them to match the first NURBS circle. Click here to see image example.
Select our wall and duplicate it 5 times with a rotate of 60 ( just as we did earlier ). Select all of the walls and combine them. Merge all the overlapping vertices. Now you're left with a funny looking mesh. You have the walls and then you have these faces a bit in against the center. Use the "Append Polygon" tool to create a polygon where these gaps are. On the image below-left you can see one of these faces marked orange.
Now snap all the vertices representing the new hole to the cylinder, ( hold "v" and use MMB to snap ) scale - and move them back out to their starting- position. We do this to get the right topology. We want the hole to look like a circular shape just like the pCylinder's top. Also, the "Split Edge Ring" tool will not work here so if we kept the vertices by the cylinder we would have to cut manually to insert more loops. Now we have the perfect cylinder form so we can just extrude the edges inwards
Click for larger image
OK, before we go on I'd like to ask you a question:
"If you stand behind a Lightwave user showing off a model, what does he do?" Lightwave- people have one favourite key they use all the time. If I handed you a keyboard and told you to tell me if this keyboard belonged to a Lightwave user you could probably determine this by looking at the tab-key. If this key is more worn out than the others... That keyboard belonged to a Lightwave user :)
Since our smooth proxy abandoned us earlier we will set up a key like this on our own. We will create a
hotkey that smooths the model when we press it and unsmooths when we release it. Similar to how the tab-
button works in Lightwave. (Note that I have never used Lightwave, but everyone knows what tab does
because of these strange people)
Open the Hotkey Editor ( Window Settings/Preferences Hotkeys...)
Under "Categories" scroll down to "User" and on the far right press "New".
Give it a name ( e.g. LightwaveKickAssButton or pSmoothUnsmoothPress )
Write this into the command-field
SmoothPolygon;
select -cl
Then click "Accept" and the recently created command is listed under "Commands"
Assign a hotkey for this operation and make sure "Press" is selected ( I assigned mine to | )
Create another command called pSmoothUnsmoothRelease or something similar. Type this into the
command field
undo;
Assign it to the same button, but make sure "Release" is checked
What we just did was assigning two different commands to the same key. When we press this ( and hold it ) the model will smooth. You can still navigate, just press alt+mousebuttons while holding the button. When you release it the model will unsmooth. Pretty clever huh? :) So whenever you want to check your model, hit "|"or the other key you assigned it to.
7 - Now select the borderEdges and extrude them four times. (or less if you don't want the nut to be too hard ). Use all views to get a smooth and nice creasing from the walls to the center. You'll probably have to tweek a lot to get it right, but with our new hotkey you'll be able to see the results fast :) When modeling this part the nurbs cage is actually quite comfortable to have as an additional reference.
When you're done tweeking it's time to finish this half.
Select the borderEdges where the hole are and extrude them once more. Move them a tiny bit in the z- axis and scale them down a tiny bit too. This is just to get a nice crease there.
When you have done this go into your sideView, select all the vertices to the right and scale them in the Z- axis. Make sure you move them so they allignes with the grid at Z=0. To allign with snapping, hold "x" while draggin the z-axis on the move tool. You will see that all the vertices snap in that direction.
Split Polygon ) to take the edge further and then I delete the old edges going away from the center
