Make a lasting indentation in a certain shape

Hi folks, I am a miniature painter who has started out to sculpt his own 3D models just recently. I am very happy that I have found Nomad which is just fantastic in my eyes and have made my first steps with the help of Glen Southern’s tutorial series, which is also fantastic.

My question is: Is there any way to make a lasting indentation into one body with another body? Let’s say I have a landscape with a number of rocks in it. For shipping reasons, I have to print the landscape and the rocks separately and glue them together later. How can I make the proper indentations into the landscape body with the rock bodies so that the rocks fit snugly into their places later? Like you would do it with clay in real life when you simply press something into the clay body and create a lasting imprint?

Thanks very much in advance for helping me out here!

I would try a boolean substraction.
Try it in a new scene.
Create as second objects a cube and place it half inside default sphere.
Hide the cube (important as this defines that boolean operation is substract hidden from visible.)
Under scene manager there is voxel merge.
Change the resolution to your likeness and choose “keep sharp edges”
Tap voxel merge.

Voilà

For your real scene it will be a bit more difficult.
Voxel merge will very likely affect your details.
You have to experiment with resolution.
And first!
Make a backup scene via “save as” and a new name
Duplicate the object you want to substract before, as the one for boolean operation will be gone.

There are a bunch of free zBrush tutorials about preparing stuff for 3D printing out there. They are using live boolean - a much more comfortable non-destructive way to create imprints and even joints for action figures. But the principle is same.

Good luck!

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Many, many thanks, knacki! It works fantastically. Your are right - you have to play around with the resolution and make sure that the same count applies to both objects. The edges around the impression are a bit rough, but this may be due to the fact that I didn’t experiment enough with the remeshing. I’ll get better at this!

Thanks again, you were really a great help to me.

Good luck with all your projects!

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:smiley: what a lovely reaction, my pleasure!

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