#BOOLEANS!
8 messages in this thread
For anyone that is on the fence deciding whether to buy/upgrade to 3D
Studio R2, I found a reason that made it worth it's weight in gold! I
needed to model a fairly complicated cellular phone, and played around with
the Boolean functions, GREAT!!! By being able to add or subtract volumes
from my model my modeling power just quadrupled, thanks Gary and ADESK! I
did, run into an unusual quirk. I'm subtracting a series of cylinders from
an extruded object (holes in the plastic for the speaker) and out of 20 odd
cylinders, all but 4 worked…. They are identical (duplicated) cylinders
and have identical placings (4 rows of 5 each). Very mysterious… I
tried new cylinders in the same location, but no luck… any ideas? Paul
Unterweiser, Unterweiser Studio-Animation
Paul, when you tried to subtract 20 cylinders from one object, you were
actually changing the "speaker" object TWENTY TIMES. After each
subtraction, the object became more complex, with much more faces around
the area you had previously subtracted.
If you re-read the documentation about boolean modeling, you'll see that
the density and configuration of the face structure around the area to be
boolean'd is very important to pay attention to. By the 10th cylinder
you'd subtracted, you made your speaker unbelievably complex.
In this case (making the holes in a speaker (or speaker grill?), it sure
sounds like you could've used the lofter tools to loft nested polygons to
created the holes. That would be approximately 1000 times more efficient.
It is certainly not the type of operation we designed booleans to optimally
execute.
– G
Gary, lofter wouldn't do it, and I wanted something more 'real' looking
than bump/opacity maps. The surface I'm punching holes in is very curved
and complex… The funny thing is, it wasn't the *last* 4 holes that
didn't work! It has something to do with the location, not the complexity
of the object… Paul Unterweiser, Unterweiser Studio-Animation
Paul, if you knew what was going on inside the boolean code, you'd be
amazed. They're really intended for sculpting operations in which you're
carving a few pieces out of an object… not for massive penetration of
arrays of objects into other objects. That's what the lofter is for (and
if you can't figure out how to do it in the lofter, you should probably use
an opacity map).
– G
Gary this is like the cube you made for me with the holes on each face.
Could you have done that in lofter?
TNx Buck
Nope. I certainly couldn't have done the operation on the cube that I did
for you with the lofter. I must be misunderstanding the problem, because
when I look at my phone, it looks like an opacity map with a little box
behind it for some dark color would make pretty decent holes for the mike
and speaker. I just don't see the need for sides to the holes unless you
actually want to fly through them into the speaker or microphone.
– G
"1000 times more efficient"?… wow, that's a lot…:-,
-MM
Well, when you're talking NxN (or N-squared) algorithms, the faces can
start adding up BIG TIME extremely fast.
– G