[Maya] Worth it to buy a plug-in for better booleans?
polycounter lvl 5
I don't think I'm wrong in saying that Maya's default booleans are pretty bad, bordering on unusable in some cases. Right now I'm making a moderately high polycount hard surface model, and it is taking way too long for me to make it in Maya the way things are going. I haven't been using booleans at all until this point where I feel like I need to use it.
To oversimplify a problem I am now facing, I have one shape with another shape coming out of it, like a branch coming out of a tree, but I'm trying to make it look like part of the model, so I'm trying to merge the vertices and get it to smoothly transition into the object I'm adjoining to it. The way I currently know how to handle this is to just extrude before you start making the second object, but I can't do that in this case. If I try to do boolean difference, it knocks a hole into the mesh which is good, but it isn't smooth at all. I don't know how I can handle this without manually adding a bazillion vertices to the model with edge loops, and even then I'm not sure what my workflow would be.
I haven't ever used plugins for booleans before, and I came across one called ADN modeler tools. It's $10. The price is cheap enough, but I want to know if this is the right direction to go. Is there something obvious I'm missing, or should I rely on a plugin to do what Maya apparently doesn't want me to do?
Here's the link to the plugin in question: http://polycount.com/discussion/174582/adn-modeler-tools-smart-modeling-scripts-for-maya/p1
To oversimplify a problem I am now facing, I have one shape with another shape coming out of it, like a branch coming out of a tree, but I'm trying to make it look like part of the model, so I'm trying to merge the vertices and get it to smoothly transition into the object I'm adjoining to it. The way I currently know how to handle this is to just extrude before you start making the second object, but I can't do that in this case. If I try to do boolean difference, it knocks a hole into the mesh which is good, but it isn't smooth at all. I don't know how I can handle this without manually adding a bazillion vertices to the model with edge loops, and even then I'm not sure what my workflow would be.
I haven't ever used plugins for booleans before, and I came across one called ADN modeler tools. It's $10. The price is cheap enough, but I want to know if this is the right direction to go. Is there something obvious I'm missing, or should I rely on a plugin to do what Maya apparently doesn't want me to do?
Here's the link to the plugin in question: http://polycount.com/discussion/174582/adn-modeler-tools-smart-modeling-scripts-for-maya/p1
Replies
If you want boolean with reorder (at the moment a little bit clunky to use):
http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2530556#Comment_2530556
it's free and can be be used in a destructive workflow