hey i’ve been doing blender for a long time, and i’ve used boolean alot. But it’s been pointed out to me that even though I cannot really see it, there are Ngons in the area im trying to boolean.
How do I make shapes like circles on flat surface meshes without boolean or moving topo to simulate a circle so I am able to extrude in?
Go to your Blender program and go to Edit Mode. Subdivide your mesh ( You can subdivide it a lot depending on how big do you want your circle to be, if we were going to talk about resolution [Low-Poly/High-Poly] ).
Here is the trick. Select all edges/vertices around the hole you made. Press Alt + Shift + S to scale it in a circle form like show on the picture above.
You can make your circle in a more better form by subdividing again and selecting faces inside including the bottom face and scaling them in a circular shape by pressing Alt + Shift + S again.
Quick tutorial, but could be useful. If you have any questions, feel free to ask!
Also, install Loop Tools from the optional add-ons. It’s not active by default. When you have a loop of edges selected, it has a “Circle” feature that works similar to the Sphere, but with additional options about whether or not to force the loop to be flat, how much to regularize spacing of the verts, etc. It’s super useful!
The other thing that is probably useful for your application, if you don’t know it already, is that when you have two loops selected on opposite sides of a solid model, using “Edge->Bridge Edge Loops” can be used to punch a connecting hole through the part, a lot like a boolean operation, but clean.