Mathematical beading is employed to build faithful and aesthetically pleasing physical models of 4-connected 3D nets such as diamond, silicates, zeolites, and hydrogen clathrates. In the cases of silicates and zeolites, the bead structures are the open packing models of hard spheres arranged according to their chemical topology. Spherical hard beads represent the oxygen anions while smaller positive cations hidden in the center of four large anions are ignored in the bead models.