boolean difference problem

#1

Hi,
I am doing the rhinoceros v4 level 1 tutorial that came with the software. I am making a telephone receiver in excersize 52 extruding.

I am trying to dig a shellow groove in the back of the receiver body by putting a u shaped surface and taking it out with boolean difference. But I keep getting a result like this.

What am I doing wrong and how can I fix this?

cyrusyn

#2

Hi,

Nothing is particularly “wrong,” it’s just that when booleaning objects that are open Rhino can’t read your mind to tell what you want to do, it uses the surface normal directions to determine which way is “outside” and therefore what the result will look like. To show the surface normals, use the Analyze->Direction tool. You can then “Flip” the normals on the surface and get the boolean to do what you want. When you just have two objects you want to boolean with each other, you can also use the Boolean2Objects command, which lets you toggle through all the possible boolean combinations and pick the result you want.

#3

Thanks so much for your reply. What is surface normal? I flipped the surface normal to point the arrows inward but the results are the same. I uploaded the rhinoceros file of this object. Would you be able to take a look at this file?

#4

try to split instead.

select first the phone, select split

the use the u-shape to split…

hit return

the do same procedure but selcting the u shape first and splitting it by the phone…

delete all unwanted surfaces

#5

Just flip the normals and it will work, you must not have actually done that, or picked the objects to boolean in the wrong order. Or, as I said, just select both the objects and run Boolean2Objects, which lets you click to toggle through different possibilities until you find the one you want.

#6

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