CompuServe Messages

As of late, I've been stepping up my involvement in modeling in 3DS itself, and have been constantly thwarted in my efforts by consistent errors in simple boolean operations. It would seem that there have been numerous meshes that I have been unable to perform simple subtractions and instersections on. Oh, yes, there's the usual "unable to complete boolean operation. Please adjust geometry" message, which has annoyed me to no end, but the truly perplexing scenario lies in "radical" or "lost" verticies, whatever you want to call them, that appear in the sstrangest locations around the mesh after a successful operation. (let's call that "apparently" successful). There seems to be little I can do about such radicals, and often they are linked to indeterminite faces that appear and flicker in the renderings. I've tried tesselating the objects, tweeking the positions and sizes of the geometries, re-lofting with all kinds of different values, yet the problem persists. I'm finding this to be the main barrier in my work with 3DS. I suppose my main question is this: Is there something I can do to correct this problem (short of limiting my geometries), or is this simply a bug that I will have to live with in this release? I might also add that the geometries in question are not inordinately complex, nor are the intersections with which I'm dealing. I would expect this to work. Another question might be; why doesn't 3DS employ the use of solid modeling principles? Even if such principles were only present as an option to create a solid geometry for the purposes of boolean an other such operations? It would *NOT* be that difficult. A solid modeling program written by a professor at my old college outperformed 3DS by FAR in boolean complexity and accuracy. I'm quite frustrated at the inability of 3DS to perform the most simple boolean operations as well. I can only hope the error is in my lack of knowledge of modeling in 3DS. Please let me know if there are others out the with similar problems, and please offer any advice you can. I can attatch a SIMPLE mesh file to a subsequent reply of an abstracted logo I was working on that has eveaded eevry attempt to correctly model if it would help illuminate the issue (c. 80k uncompressed). Thank you… Jerome Kalisz