First, thanks for all the help!

I'd accomplished something very similar to your suggestion shortly after posting the question. We're getting close!

However, as I'd stated in the original post, the grooves are not sharp extrusions inward. Instead they are kind of half "hot-dog" shapes removed from the base mesh. I'd said something about being able to create a cylinder with hemispherical end caps and removing them with a boolean operation.

So the current state of affairs is attached to this post. I drew a vertical line, projected it onto the curved surface, and then used the resulting curve as a sweep curve. I then capped those ends with spheres and bool-added them together and removed them from the base.

So far so good.

However, I can't add fillets to the edges of the removed areas. The boolean removals worked fine (I think) but I get no result when I select the resulting edges and try to apply a fillet of any radius.

Again, many many thanks for the help. If I can get filleted edges I'll have the solution to the problem.

Cheers!

Hi Skwerm, sorry I had missed that part about the indents being capsule-like.

So yeah the basic process will still be similar, you've got to try and model the capsule parts as some kind of solid object first and then use that to cut the main body with a boolean.

You're having some fillet troubles in this case because of a little tiny edge in your booleaned result here (looking here from below upwards):



Zooming in on that area you can see this little tiny edge fragment, shown selected here:



That little edge corresponds to the seam edge of the dome part of your capsule object:




That's going to be a problem for filleting, because the filleter is not able to totally consume an edge like that away, the fillet is going to be limited in size up to the point where it hits the end of that little edge, which is only a very small distance.

So you're going to want to get those dome pieces rotated around a bit so that when they leave their imprint they won't have such a small bit of edge left in the surviving piece.

- Michael

Hi Skwerm, also instead of rotating the domes, an easier solution would be to just move the cutting objects just a little bit outwards before booleaning them so that there won't be that little edge part left towards the inside.

If you move it about 0.03 units outwards it would do the trick.

- Michael

Hi Skwerm, I've attached an example here - this one should now fillet more easily after it is booleaned.

The pieces are just very slightly positioned further out from your previous one.

- Michael