Hi YHWH_777,

> Thanks for all of the replies, but all of the replies are only offering a part
> of the solution. That is, you are drilling the holes on only one section of
> the object (either the half sphere at the top or the cylinder on the bottom).
> I need to the holes to cover the entire object.

Your initial image sort of suggested that you were targeting the cylinder, because of the nature of the totally regular flat pattern that you showed.

The cylinder is equal in proportion along its height, so a regular pattern like that is possible to fit on the cylinder without distorting it.

The sphere portion is much different than that - the sphere does not have a constant amount of surface area on it, as you travel vertically up the sphere it reduces in surface area, until finally collapsing at a point near the top.

So take for example this upper ring of your sphere shown in red here:




You can see there that ring of the sphere is smaller in circumference than the circumference of a circle taken from the cylinder.

That means that as you move upwards along the sphere, there is less physical area available in those regions are compared to the cylinder. So there is simply not as much area to fit the same number of holes as you travel up the sphere.

But meanwhile look at your pattern that you showed initially, notice the top line of your pattern:



The top line of your pattern that you want to match to the tip of the sphere contains 20 circles just exactly the same as the parts that you want to put on the cylinder. It's not possible to do that without shrinking or distorting the holes because of the greatly reduced surface area in those regions.

It's sort of like you're asking how to put 5 gallons of water into a 1 gallon bucket.... You can't - it just does not fit!

Probably what you want is to have a different number of holes in the circumference as you get closer to the collapsed together point at the top of the sphere.

To get that, you probably want to create a set of cylinders like Bemfarmer shows above, but when you shift from the cylinder area to the sphere area, you will need to both reduce the number of copies of the cylinders going and also stagger them by rotating the starting one before you replicate it (using Array circular) in the top view so that the rows are also staggered more as you move upwards.

You may in fact need to just manually place the cylinders in the sphere area where you judge they have good spacing rather than trying to automatically generate them.


But anyway, the type of image that you showed initially where you have the exact same number of objects in the upper rows of your 2D pattern simply can not fit onto the reducing surface area of the sphere as it shrinks down to a single point at the top. An actual 2D pattern of it would look more like a smaller number of items in the region of the pattern that corresponds to the shrinking area. Unless you want the holes to be distorted and squished down?

- Michael