CompuServe Messages

JKJ, 'Twas a delight to see you at SIGGRAPH. Are you really the Boolean King? I just got done teaching a class in Green Bay, Wisconsin with James Murphy. We did a section on booleans. I wonder if you have anything to add to these basic concepts that we covered: 1. If you boolean a hole into an object such as a flat plate, sometimes it seems to work fine (the mesh looks fine) but when you render, some of the faces around the hole seem tilted or pinched. Reassigning smoothing groups sometimes solves the problem but sometimes doesn't. 2. If you get "Cannot complete boolean operation, please adjust geometry" you can sometimes have some success by moving or scaling one of the objects slightly. You can also try remaking the objects so they have a more similar vertex density. I have found that trying to boolean a very dense object and a non-dense object will sometimes not work while the same boolean with objects of similar density works fine. Any comments? The first one is particularly frustrating. Sometimes the only way to make an object, say a mechanical part, is by booleaning a hole into it. I tell students to use lofting where possible but you can't always do this, then they're stuck with a pinched-looking part. Michele