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First time posting, let me know if I can provide additional details or if I've missed any best-practices. Appreciate your help.

I'm trying to replicate this speaker grill, which takes a dip at the edges.. I've been having the damnedest time finding an elegant solution that doesn't crash my machine.

I can get a fairly nice looking result from a distance, but on closer inspection the edges tend to bunch up and present more problems when modifiers are converted to mesh.

In theory, this would be used for 3D resin printing of a guitar amp model, with the grid as visual texture over a manifold shape (filled in behind the mesh). But for animation, it would be ideal to have an open backed version. However, at this stage I would love your advice to learn a proper nondestructive workflow.

My original version for animation LOOKS good with the addition of a Bevel modifier, but when converted to mesh, the edges are a disaster of overlapping geometry that doesn't clean up well, making booleans and 3D printing a no-go.

I've tried various combinations of shrink-wrapping a grid mesh (faces deleted) with skin and/or solidify modifiers. The curve profile was drawn with a screw modifier, tested with manual subdivision and subdivision surface modifier. The curve does seems like less of a problem than the grid itself, but I could be wrong.

Looking at the raw mesh with modifiers turned off, things look pretty nice. But fleshing it out gets nasty with any combination of Skin, Subdivision, or Solidify. I've also checked for any duplicate or hidden vertices.

TLDR, I've come at it from different angles but always end up with crazy edges and overcomplicated geometry. Happy to provide file links, but curious how advanced users might go about it from scratch?

Thanks so much!

real world reference image

mesh appears clean without modifiers

enter image description here

enter image description here Smoothing with subdivision bloats and puckers

enter image description here Skin modifier buckles at the curve edge

enter image description here Previous version looks good with bevel...

enter image description here Until inspecting the edges, where the geometry buckles

enter image description here X-ray showing how crazy the geometry gets on beveled outer edges

BAlbright
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    https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/66769/how-to-transform-a-plane-into-a-honeycomb/ https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/98957/bend-a-honeycomb-mesh https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/276404/how-to-make-a-microphone-material-texture https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/6934/how-to-distribute-an-object-to-a-hexagonal-grid – Duarte Farrajota Ramos Jul 18 '23 at 22:53
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    https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/223591/honeycomb-boolean-around-cylinder https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/28103/creating-a-truck-exhaust-mesh https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/51233/how-to-make-a-perforated-plate https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/58811/how-to-create-a-circular-shaped-grid-similar-to-a-manhole-cover – Duarte Farrajota Ramos Jul 18 '23 at 22:53
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    Hello and welcome. This has already been asked in many different forms over time, but you didn't acknowledge any of the existing posts, so we are not sure if you saw them but among all the various techniques described none fulfil any particular requisite of yours, or you simply didn't do any research. – Duarte Farrajota Ramos Jul 18 '23 at 22:58
  • Hi @DuarteFarrajotaRamos thank you very much! I did explore some of those previous posts in my research… but not all. Even if they don’t resolve my issue fully, I will certainly learn a lot by exploring those workflows. And in the future I will try to explain more of my research to clear up any confusion. Appreciate your time! – BAlbright Jul 18 '23 at 23:31
  • I think the easiest way you could solve this is to just remove the outside edge. It's covered by that ring of rubber material so there's really no reason to have it there since you are not gonna see it. If you think about how that kind of thing is made in real life, it's just a mesh that they cut into a circle and pressed into shape. It doesn't need complex geometry around it, that can be a separate object. – Cornivius Jul 19 '23 at 13:02

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