Okay, I know we just had a huge long discussion on round dimples on a circular surface while keeping the round dimple profile. This truly is for a purpose, I'm not just trying to waste time. It is the same concept but instead of a circular dimple I'm trying to create a hex or pentagon shaped dimple. If you are familiar with golfing, look at a callaway golf ball dimple pattern, it is a pentagon. It is that same concept but as opposed to a spherical shape I'm trying to put that on a circular shape just like my last discussion.
Example of the callaway golf ball dimple and an image I found that might be helpful. I've been playing with this for a while and can't figure out how to do it. The bottom of the dimple doesn't have to be perfectly spherical, in fact that's impossible. I do want it to be or appear as smooth or spherical as possible however.
Thank you!
Same as the circular dimples (use a VSS) but use a conic instead of a arc. If you feel really experimental (or some kind of mental...) add a trajpar to the sharpness value. Just remember that the VSS origin curve or chain curve must be tangent throughout.
As for making the hex correct on the cylinder, take a look at the wrap feature. That will keep you busy too 
"How to give your CPU a heart attack!"
there's got to be a texture opportunity with that one.
Doing this one made it clear that mapping the hex with the wrap feature is required. This makes it possible to use the Fill Pattern and have a common "frame" width around each instance on all 6 sides.
VSS; simple section with arc and spline using 3 guide strings. No rounds!
Can't you just see the honey drip'n from these 
Okay, the tech...
And yes, you can use the trick from the dimple discussion to merge the fill pattern all-around matching up perfectly. In this case, I sized the cylinder to the pattern: 15mm hex across the flats; patterned at 15.1; cylinder height 151 (10 and 9+2x1/2); and 12 around (24-offset).
Actually no. When we did the circle, "we" wanted it to be visually circular from a dead on view. I also wanted to keep it simple since the pattern was rather loose.
Since we are continuing the discussion, I went for introducing mapping accuracy. On cylinders, there is a "slight" difference but a key difference you will use more often that you expect.
With the circle projection method, you will find that the width of the actual arc diameter along the cylinder (arclength) is longer than the height along the cylinder's axis. This means that if you went for a very tight pattern, like the hex pattern, you would have found different gaps vertically and horizontally or you would be adjusting the pattern to match it, if you even could (fill patterns are not fully controllable).
Here are the two methods overlayed:
- Yellow is the original planar sketch
- Red is the Projected sketch
- Green is the Wrapped sketch
A closeup will reveal the difference.
The smaller the cylinder or the larger the feature, the more pronounced this becomes. When you need absolute accuracy to manage features on a cylinder, wrapping becomes a very powerful tool. In the case shown here, matching the fill pattern all the way around required absolute accuracy of the sketch I used to define the diameter of the cylinder (remember, I opted for a fixed feature size this time). That slight difference would have to have been accounted for since the error would have been multiplied by 24 (12 and 12).
One tip for wrapping; insert a coordinate system in your sketch (it doesn't need to be the datum CSYS). This makes wrapping much more accurate when placing it. Otherwise, your entire sketch could be offset based on a bounding box Creo is using to place the wrapped sketch. You have to trust me on this one. Use a sketch CSYS in all your Wraps!
Patterns often choke on datum plane constrained features.
I will say that you might want to learn constraining a sketch fully.
In the world of PTC, neatness counts
By the way, to increase the tangent accuracy of the spline, reduce the offset of the outside wrapped hex to something very small. This tangency is an approximation after all.
