Modelling the Metal Face Plate

By

Pat Connelly

The metal faceplate is a rectangle with minimal thickness and four brads.   The brads have rounded tops - bolt heads.  Making the plate is easy as it is a simple plane extruded to a minimal thickness.  I used 2 or 3 imagine units for the thickness.  I have found all objects should have some thickness to look good ( translate "real" ) in Imagine.

How to make the bolt heads?  I took a regular sphere and bisected it with a simple plane.  It is easier to work with full sized objects and later scale them down to the teeny tiny bolt heads.  I made the plane with very few sections because I am going to slice the sphere with the plane.  I commonly get that stupid "intersecting line error".  Fewer lines within the plane seem to help.   But, if you get that error repositioning the plane slightly usually corrects the problem.

After selecting both the sphere and plane, perform the slice command.   If it works, you should see the above picture.  You have a set of grouped objects - two half spheres, 1 round disk, and one plane with a hole cut in it.

Here I have pulled the objects apart, so you can see all of them.   Ungroup them and delete all but one 1/2 sphere, our bolt head.

I scaled the bolt head ( 1/2 sphere ) down to the appropriate size and copied and pasted 3 more for four bolt heads.  The heads were manually positioned and joined to the plate.  Finished product.

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