CompuServe Thread

Scott, you might try starting with objects that have more faces in them — this may help your boolean objects retain the shape(s) you are looking for. Tesselate them before booleaning. After the boolean operation, do some Surface/Smoothing/Object/Auto Smooth ops with varying degrees of smoothing to get the desired surface on your finished object. Use Optimize, or Gus's recently UL'ed real-time G-Shaded viewer to quickly check your model during the processes. -Alan

Scott, If you've been manually editing points I assume you've tried using auto-smoothing and you're not get the results you wish. Auto-smoothing is a best fit approach, but to get selected areas with a variety of angles smoothed appropriately I would suggest selecting the faces that you want smoothed together and detaching them. Then use auto-smooth for a best fit on that group, and then attach them back to the object. This can be time consuming as well but you have a greater degree of control and is not as time consuming as point editing on a complex mesh. There are ways that you can assign a face to a specific group but this can get messy with a complex mesh. Smoothing groups can overlap, which may or may not be what you want. Try detaching them, this works in most cases and if you need them to share a group you can assign the detached portion all at once. If you need to, you can then re-weld the vertices, just don't use auto-smooth again. <g> -JE