CGTalk - Anyone use power boolean before?

Kartoffel

08-22-2003, 05:02 PM

I dont know it for Max in particular but booleans in general mess up your models.

If you can somehow manage it, join your models manually. It may be a bit more work but you can be shure to get a good and clean model! (well, a bit depending on your moddeling skills of course ;) )

Boxsmiley

08-22-2003, 05:17 PM

Hey Kartoffel, I've always heard that boolean's mess up meshes...When people say that it seems like magic to me. Example, i push in the gas pedal and voila! the car goes. But there is more to it than just pushing the gas pedal, things happen inside the car that when the gas pedal is pushed the car moves. I want to get rid of the magic that when you boolean something it messes up the mesh. Why does boolean mess up the mesh? Kartoffel and anyone who may know the answer, is there anyway we can take it to the micropscopic level and discuss why is it that booleans mess up meshes or even better why is something an invalid mesh? Thanks. :)

halo

08-22-2003, 05:34 PM

you have an invalid mesh because you have overlapping polys in your original items....

powerbooleans works much better than max's although it can be a bit picky sometimes about the original geometry or needs the odd xform before booleaning now and then

if you dont have any success with powerbooleans try max's and edit the result

eirenicon

08-22-2003, 05:46 PM

Here is an (http://mousevomit.com/v1/misc/tutorials/booleans/booleans.html) interesting link on booleans.

CapnPanic

08-22-2003, 05:48 PM

i've used the power booleans demo (go download it from their site for free) and it was pretty awesome. i didn't get any bad meshes, and it was easy to use. but don't take my word, just go download the demo (its a 2 week demo i think) from their site and try it :)

Dave Black

08-22-2003, 05:51 PM

While I believe booleans are a last resort in most cases, you guys saying to hand model everything without booleans are insane. Have you ever actually tried to create certain shapes? Some things simply cannot be done with manual poly editing alone. Maya, Max, XSI, LW, C4D, I don't care what you use. Booleans are there for a reason.

Boolean math may add some problems to your mesh, but that's the cost of using the tool.

Again, to those of you spoutiong off nonsense about booleans being terrible, I suggest you try modeling somthing a bit more mechanically complex requiring high precison.

-3DZ

:D

Self-Designer

08-23-2003, 10:34 AM

Oh, Max's Boolean sucks, i had 2 do some boolean calculations among a loft and some cylinders and it all messed up, but when we got Power Boolean - that was wounderful! I really like that plugin.

I think the only way power boolen makes troubles is if your objects' volume isn't defined right - like taking a box and bending it too much so it enters itself... (no i didn't make such a test, but i had an animated object that became wrong-volume-defined in a frame or two and i had to fix it).

ambient-whisper

08-23-2003, 10:53 AM

hopefully this will be added to more renders.. but renderman has this awesome feature where you can boolean at render time.so you dont have to worry about your actual geometry. you just put a number of items into groups or something. and voila. itll even pick up your texture from object B into object A perfectly.

halo

08-23-2003, 11:20 AM

bryce had that as well, but it can be a pia when dealing with complex shapes

MikeRhone

08-23-2003, 06:32 PM

I love booleans. (Well, in Maya)

The only thing I have to watch out for is cleaning up all of the N-sided polygons it produces. I use booleans quite a bit, and I never have any issues at all. If I'm doing something stupid, Maya lets me know, I fix it and do it again.

m

KiboOst

08-24-2003, 01:32 AM

Yeah, booleans ARE usefull for modeling. I've done some mechanical pieces that were not possible without out (yes you can allways put all vertices and faces manually, well, take a pencil then)

Booleans problem in max is that it create extra vertices and edges everywhere. So you need to clean the model after the boolean operation.

I've tried PowerB demo, and I have to say that these extra vertices/edges doesn't exist with it, you allways (apart very special cases) got a clean useable poly.

my 2cent

Kib

RezaMisaghi

08-24-2003, 10:12 AM

Remember the Animation !!! The Boolean's Oprands are animatable .... & you can easily make a hole growing in animation , which is so hard to do it with hands .
So we need Booleans !!
PowerBoolean is fine & faster than Max booleans....

Reza Misaghi

grambo

08-24-2003, 05:53 PM

I've run into size issues with standard booleans before. I found I would get bad results if the objects were too small.

Here's what I did. I selected my two objects and scaled them together to be EXTREMELY large. Then I created two box primatives aligned to the two objects. I turned them into editable meshes and attached one of my two boolean objects to each of them. Then I chose edit subobject element and deleted the box meshes. This left me with my two objects again except that their XYZ space had been reset to the larger scale. When I booleaned them together I got more accurate results.

Then of course I had to scale them back down again to the original scale. A little math was needed to figure out how much to scale them down in relation to how much I had scaled them up before. Then I did the box trick again - attaching my booleaned object and then deleting the box element, thus resetting the xyz space back to normal.

Of course this doesn't work for animation!

I don't know if this will help you, but it's my two cents!

grambo

08-24-2003, 06:16 PM

Renderman can do render time boolean operations because, as I understand it, it tesselates your meshes on rendertime to create "micropolygons". Basically every pixel in your image would contain multiple micropolygons. So the intersecting shape simply has reversed normals and it trims off the extra geometry during this process. This micropolygon thing is also what lets it do such awesome displacement mapping. Not sure exactly how it works or if I've described it right. This is a pretty simplistic description!Please correct me if I've got it wrong!

BartW

08-25-2003, 11:04 AM

Originally posted by 3DZealot
While I believe booleans are a last resort in most cases, you guys saying to hand model everything without booleans are insane. Have you ever actually tried to create certain shapes?

Exactly. I often found myself working on a detail car shape with a low poly count only to mess it all up because I had to cut out some small hole somewhere. There's also a thing like 'time'.....can't spend ages on the empire state keyhole, just cause max messes it up. (well, figure of speech ofcourse ;) )

But anyway, if they don't fix this in max 6, I'm going to move to something else. I always thought it's ridiculous to have people buy something extra to make your software work like lightwave or maya do out of the box. There should have been a 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 5.7, 5.8, 5.9 that fixes most problems before even thinking about coming forward with a 6.0. (I guess the 6.0 really only is max 3.6 or so)

Originally posted by Rhonedog
[B]I love booleans. (Well, in Maya)[B]

Instead of teasing people in the max forum, you could show some sympathy for our worries ;)

TOMMY 3D FREAK

08-27-2003, 01:52 PM

Hi guy's,

I hear everyone's complaining about booleans, but I have 2 agree with 3dzealot. The functionality of booleans has a lot to do with the person using them. For instance, if you want to cut a hole out of your car to make head lights, detach the specific parts and perform the boolean operation, this works a lot of times. And if your mesh get's messed up, remove the unwanted edges, and your ok again. Try to keep the area's that you want to boolean as non complex as possible, because booleans work less with complex geometry

Boxsmiley

08-27-2003, 02:13 PM

Well i was able to figure out why my meshes were not boolean. It was due to the fact that it wasn't a valid mesh. So i used STL checker, and fixed the errors. When it has no errors i assume that it is a valid mesh. I'm right so far in that sense. All my meshes that have no errors boolean in any way or fashion that i need them to. So thanks everyone!

On a side note, as a newb i was unaware that a plane was automatically an Invalid mesh due to the fact that it has open edges! Most of my meshes were planes in some fashion. So i had to select the edges and extrude down to create a bottom. That made my errors drop from 890 to 64. Then i deleted the 64 double faces that were left and the rest is history!

:beer:

g.samsa

08-27-2003, 02:23 PM

i never really found any use for a boolean. i mostly use nurbs modeling or spline and surface which allow for booleaned like geometry.

if a am desperate to use it though - i use solid works great for technical rendering - easy to use too. ;)

Clanger

08-27-2003, 02:58 PM

I'm always creating complex mechanical shapes and I've tried using booleans a lot, including power booleans. I still find the clean up you have to do more often than not takes more time than just box modeling from scratch.
I haven't found a shape yet that I couldn't make by hand.

In answer to the original question though, power booleans are far better than max standard.

Animatings another matter though.

Boxsmiley

08-27-2003, 04:36 PM

Well This is what i was trying to boolean together...so as you can see there is way to many polys to combine by hand. So i was trying to find an automated way to combine large items like such. So i found Power Boolean, and like i said in my last post. I finally figured out how to convert these meshes into Valid objects. Oh and I didn't use displacement maps either. Later :wavey:

http://www.polygonists.org/cgimages/Mountains.jpg

Clanger

08-27-2003, 04:59 PM

If power boolean can weld those two meshes together smoothly I'll be impressed, very impressed.
Please post the result.

Dave Black

08-27-2003, 05:03 PM

Boxsmiley:

That terrain is most impressive. Erosion is spot on. Care to share how you did it?

-3DZ

:D

g.samsa

08-27-2003, 06:06 PM

are those Bryce exports????

if not that is very impressive

how did you do it?

Boxsmiley

08-27-2003, 07:14 PM

Here is a quick sample look at the two items being Power boolean together, not in a very artistic fashion ofcoarse... but just to show that it worked. Both meshes were STL checked and have zero errors, therefore we can assume that in this case the meshes are valid. They are not Bryce exports, and i hate to say this, but i'm under an NDA not to reveal how i came to this point. Sorry! :shrug: In the future when this technique is perfected we will announce how! Thanks for all your help.

:beer:

http://www.polygonists.org/cgimages/Mountains_02.jpg

http://www.polygonists.org/cgimages/Mountains_03.jpg

ambient-whisper

08-27-2003, 07:19 PM

not saying you took this approach. but it looks like zbrush+ some form of polyreduce to me. its pretty easy to recreate what you got there with it.

g.samsa

08-27-2003, 07:25 PM

well
nevertheless its a good attempt.
this puzzeles me still:
how come you didn't create it as one mesh in the first place.

for terrain i use bryce you get pretty good results too very easy to ajust just have to do a good resolution export and if you have enough power don't even have to optimize.