Modeling workflow for symmetrical indented plane

Question

I'm fairly new to blender and don't have a good overlook of what can be done with the modifiers yet. Currently I have a plane with a more or less centered ridge, now I wanted to make an X-crossing by copying that plane, turning it around 90 degrees and somehow combining it with the first one. However it don't find a way to do this.

Basically, I'm looking for function that aligns an object to the axis minima of 2 other objects. Or any other way to accomplish this.

Okay, here are some pictures to better show what I would like to acquire.

Assume I have a plane like this:

Now I copy this plane and rotate it around 90 degrees around the Z axis. The result looks like this from above:
And like this from below:

These two planes are joint to get a single object. Now what I would like to have is something like this:

This was done creating a second plane with a higher vertex count and using shrinkwrap. However, the curves in the "rift" are a bit smoothed and not as sharp as in the combined origin mesh. When I use projection for shrinkwrap I get artifacts.

This was the best I was able to get. Is there a more simple method and/or a method which is more exact, meaning I get the sharp corners where the "rifts" are crossing?

Answer 1

starting with two objects like you describe:

Add a shrinkwrap modifier

to get something like this:

Some faces look beveled because the quads forming the mesh cannot accommodate the deformation properly.

To correct the topology of the edges in question, there are two options:

• 1: Press Ctrl T to triangulate the mesh.

• 2: Manually subdivide the offending faces selecting vertices and using J to join the edges.

  

Answer 2

1. Add an Array modifier to your plane
2. Add an Empty to your scene
3. Set the Object Offset of the modifier to the new Empty:
4. Move the Emtpy up along Z, and rotate it 90 degrees.

Of course, you'll have to manually move the Empty up and down until it looks good.. I'm not sure how you could automatically detect the amount of offset required.

When you click "Apply" on the Array modifier, both planes will exist as a single object.