How to make a honeycomb pattern

[Tochiro76]

I'm trying to make some solar cells for a 3d model but I want to do something different besides the standard rectangle full of squares thing that is commonly seen on the international space station or some sat in orbit.

I want to make a honeycomb pattern in the rectangular solar cell but I don't want to have to model every freakin octagon shape in the pattern, I wanna get something from a drop down menu and "BAM!!!" done lol.

This comes in handy when someone has already enlarged one end of a rectangle but can't just make a bunch of octagons and fit them in there and then conform them to the altered shape of the rectangle... does anyone know wut I'm talkin about?

I need to know if there is some kind of pattern creator or plugin or something that can be used to do this honeycomb pattern in 3dsmax.

Any help is appreciated thanks:-)

[spudmonkey]

There might be some maxscript somewhere that does it. The other option is to create two offset octagons and then create a number of reference copies of them in the z-plane, then copy the two lines of octagons in the x-plane sufficient times to fill the space you need. Should only take 30 seconds to do

[Melak]

If you make that 2D octagons, and if they're offset precisely it should be easy to attach all to one object, cut/quickslice the unneeded ones away, auto-weld the vertices, and extrude the polygons to have a proper 3D honeycomb pattern

[nyrath]

Keeping in mind, of course, that honeycombs are composed of hexagons, not octagons.

[chrono]

What you want is PolyBoost

If not then just make your hexagons from a 3*7 grid plane and array them.