Boolean help

[Matt Leishman]

The students I teach at BYU have this problem quite often too. The only way I've been able to have this problem go away is to delete the history on those meshes before performing the boolean operation. I can't say I'm totally well versed on what is specifically happening under the hood to cause the surface to dissappear like that, but I can only imagine that when the mesh already has a lenghty history, all those history nodes are competing with a fresh new, extremely modifying operation - and a lot of times maya doesn't like it. Like I said, deleting the history usually does the trick.

If not, try exporting the pieces individually as .dxf files. Then get rid of the offending meshes already in your scene, and re-import them as their new .dxf formats. I've found that a lot of issues that are bumped into when modeling in polys in maya are fixed by doing this simple operation too. Just something to keep in mind I guess.

Good Luck!!

[Indavisual]

Thanks alot.

I just decided to merge edges. I was having trouble with that too til I tried combining the shapes before i merged edges, which worked.

[Matt Leishman]

that'll do too. good work on figuring out a solution on your own!!

[xstatik]

another trick that i've found usefull is to separate the face of the torso that you're booleaning (sp?), and make sure that the leg is CAPPED where it'll intersect. run the boolean, and recombine the torso and merge the border edges. it works about 95% of the time for me without those weird errors :beer:

[TheWraith]

i like booleans and all but for characters? they don't seem like the best way to go about modeling organic characters. i'd stick with matching topology and the good 'ol combine and merge vertices approach.

[Isrithe]

I agree with what Wraith is saying. In the long run, using booleans for organic characters might cause a lot of problems in animation.

[Indavisual]

Thanks for all the useful info. Yeah Ill use combine and merge from now on. The only reason I used the booleans is cuz the merging edges wasnt working but now that that I figured it out Ill use that.

Here is what you guys helped me with. Boolean connected the arm to the torso and merge edged the leg. Im not done sculpting him so the halves arent merged. I just mirrored it for show.

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