help with booleans

[M_Orlich]

i generally find booleans messy and try to avoid them. i would love to hear a case for them though, if someone uses them a lot.

matt

[ZVAN]

i had lotsa those probs too using booleans..
but have u tried deleting the object's history?..

[TheWraith]

you have to be careful of how you boolean. i'm not sure on the true RULES to booleans. and i've had the problem you're talking about tons of times before. i think this problem is usually due to a bad shell... like if you have a box with one edge so that it's just a plane sticking out from one edge of the box... then a boolean performed on that box isn't going to work and you'll get an error like "// Error: Cannot perform boolean operation for topological reasons : Object1 is non-manifold //" basically telling you that you have non-manifold geometry. so... now you know that booleans don't work with non-manifold geometry. if you've done a boolean and you are sure you don't have non-manifold geometry there are a couple things to try. poly-cleanup will ensure you don't have non-manifold geometry ;) also sometimes (not usually but sometimes) triangulating and then quadrangulating the mesh will help with booleans. and othertimes it's where you're trying to perform the boolean. sometimes maya doesn't like half of a boolean object going through one face and only halfway through another, so sometimes checking to make sure that the booleans aren't intersecting weirdly will remedy an operation. another thing i've run across, it's not always the boolean operation you are currently doing that might be bad if the geometry disappears... sometimes its the operation done just BEFORE the one you are currently trying to perform. so keep that in mind as well.

[misterdi]

For using boolean operation in Maya you should make the object clean. Most cases where boolean operation fail will give you warning that you have polygon that have non-manifold object, but this is sometimes misleading.

I'm used to clean-up first all the object until I'm sure everything is OK.

In some cases also you need to move slightly the object so faces from both polymesh are not on top one on another, this will cause confusion for the software, for example if you got 2 same cube and do union operation maybe you will get un-expected result.

But if the geometry is clean, boolean will help a lot in modeling polymesh.

Best regards,

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