Last year I was working on a case for a circuit board that goes into Mercedes cars. It needed holes for cooling and I thought it would be neat to make them out of the MB logo. I tried for a while in Alibre Design before giving up.

I owned a copy of MoI but I hasn't see anything in there that could do what I wanted quickly and easily. I also had a lot of things going on in my life so no time for endless research into options or asking on forums. I needed to get the job done and move on so I just settled for boring circular holes.

Then the other day I stumbled across RadialPattern by accident while looking for something else.

Wow - this is amazing. Within 10 minutes I was able to create exactly what I wanted. Of course the project was long finished so no use to me now, but if only back then I would have been able to quickly and easily find this add on in the limited time I had.

For me this is a 'must have' add on and I can think of a lot of uses for it now I know about it. Nice! Many thanks to Max for taking the time to create this add on for the community. I really appreciate your hard work!

Hi Andy, not to take anything away from Max, but FYI the pattern you show there can be done with the built in Transform > Array > Circular command pretty easily. You'd just do it in 3 passes increasing the "Item count" option on each pass.

It looks like this:

Pass 1 - Item count = 9:



Pass 2 - Item count = 14:



Pass 3 - Item count = 19



- Michael

It was a quick example. If I really needed it I would add some twist and progressively reduce the size of the outer ones slightly. The sliders allows me to play around with the pattern until I get something pleasing to the eye. Quick and easy. What you described is what I did in Alibre Design anyway so not worth the trouble of exporting STP, importing STP and creating it to finish the part.