How did I make this soccer-ball/honeycomb shape?

Question

A while ago, I made this:

Now, I'd like to make something like it again, but I can't remember how I did it the first time.

I'm pretty sure I started with an icosphere, then maybe I used a modifier. I'm not sure how I "carved out" the spaces between each hexagon. The larger open areas I deleted manually, though.

Answer 1

Bevel modifier

• Start by adding an Icosphere with 3 levels of subdivision
• Add a Bevel modifier with Vertex Only option enabled. Now you should have the main pattern clearly visible.

As we want to delete the inner exagon of each loop, we can take advance of the modifier to add a distinctive feature to those faces in order to select them easily: increase the number of Segments to 2.

Then, in order to make the shapes less regular, decrease the Width value to something like 0.09.

• Add a second Bevel of wanted Width modifier to create a "corridor" between the "main" faces.

• Apply both modifiers, enter edit mode, pick one exagonal n-gon and select similar area faces with a threshold of 0.006, invert selection and delete other faces.

• Final touch with Solidify modifier.

Result: