Pls I need help with this woven basket (3ds max)

[rodkiller]

Hello everybody!
Im breaking my head trying to model this basket easily.
I need tips and tricks.
The handles and the top ring aren’t a problem but i need help with the woven pattern, and the fact that the holes of the bottom are smaller… bff
i just don’t know how to do it.
Pls help!
BTW this is my first post!
Thx in advance!
Have a good day!!

[cookepuss]

Welcome , Rod. Okay. Here are my initial observations:

1. If the top holes seem bigger than the bottom then maybe it’s because the bottom of the basket is actually smaller. Let me explain. Imagine a trapezoid. The wider end represents the top of the basket while the thinner end represents the bottom. The individual belts of the weave are uniform throughout; IOW, the sides run parallel in a perfect rectangle. So, as you travel along that upside down trapezoid shape making the bag’s side, the belts come ever so slightly closer together. This makes the holes smaller.

2. The weave is just a weave. It’s not super complex to make. Over. Under. Over. Under. ETC. What you have to do, however, is model the basket flat. Just be aware that since the bottom is going to be tapered, the flattened shape will not be rectangular. It’ll have a bit of a curve. As I imagine it, the shape should be something kinda like this:
   

   
   
   Note that the dashed lines would indicate where they’d fold to make the bottom of the basket.

3. Once you’ve woven across the pattern, it’s just a matter of wrapping it around and then folding the bottom. This is, of course, making the assumption that you want something more physically accurate.

4. Don’t worry about the ugly top. You are going to have belt bits hanging out up top. Just boolean cut them level/flat and then cover it up with that brown belted rim in the picture. This is what they do irl projects. Cover up whatever looks ugly. Hey. What do you think the molding in your house is made for. It’s decorative, but is designed to hide the seams or messier aspects of construction.

FWIW, I used a very similar technique for this Chinese food container I modeled some 20-ish (yikes!) years ago.

Your only real issue is in making sure that the weave is seamless once it’s wrapped around. That’s not super hard since it’s a pattern we’re dealing with here. It just takes a bit of planning on your part. HINT: Adjusting the angle of the belts in the weave can make it a lot get them to meet at the seam.

If it helps, prototyping the whole thing with paper will help you to visualize it better. It’ll save you TONS of time too.

EDIT>>> Yes. I know. IRL, the belts at the bottom of the basket get woven together too. You’re 100% free to pursue that option for more real world accuracy. It’s just an exercise of manually weaving/modeling them once you’ve got the primary wrap around in place. Not hard. More tedious than anything else.

[rodkiller]

Wow ! Thank you so much!
This answer it’s pretty detail! so kind of you!
I need to save as much time as I can and all the weaving process it’s just too messy i think.
I have this olution in mind:

I`ve made a base for the basket and transform the topology into a cross wired one, and after that i’ve instanced two canes (one mirrored) dividing 360 degrees by the separation angle in between those.
With this i can weave all at the same time.
But i lose the square like shape at the bottom.
What do you think?
How can i solve this mess?
Thx again mate!

[cookepuss]

Off the top of my head, have you tried using a lattice deformer or some such to conform that bottom to a square shape? It might screw with some of the proportions down low. However, it might not be super noticeable if nobody’s looking that close. Just a quick idea.

My original method is a more down & dirty, holistic method. However, thinking about it now, there IS a workaround that should be much quicker. Use ZBrush in combination with retopo.

1. Start off with a tapered cuboid, small end at the bottom.
2. Subdivide the mesh to some decently high degree.
3. Just sculpt the weave manually and make sure to keep the individual woven belts more or less the same width and thickness. The gaps between woven sections will suggest holes, but there won’t actually be holes… yet.
4. Export the solid sculpt out to your main app.
5. Retopo the damn thing. Just don’t add polys where there should be holes.
6. Fill in the geometry for the inside of the new mesh.

That should be it.

FWIW, the manual weave technique isn’t all that complicated if you use spline profiles and rails to represent the individually woven belts. Any “weaving” you do would have been to the much simpler spline rails. Far less fiddly than tweaking tons of mesh vertices.

There are tons of ways to accomplish any given task. There is no “right” way. Whatever works for you, imo.