A 3dsmax workflow to automate my welded steel structure construction?

AlecMoody

I have been talking to a friend about doing this with houdini but I wanted to see if anyone here had suggestions for a max centric approach first.

I'm modeling a lot of welded tube and plate structures for Wrench. It's very tedious work with lots of manual cleanup.

Here are a few examples showing different configurations.

I'm looking to have arbitrary input geometry, be non destructive if possible, and end up with a clean boolean result + chamfer strip between parts that is already UVs mapped in a straight line. The next chassis im building has ~75 components which leads to well over 100 joints. Manual cleanup on each joint ends up being incredibly time consuming.

Also here is a video where I intentionally created some common scenarios that need a lot of manual cleanup:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbuI2a83DUE

Thoughts? Is  there a reasonable max script solution or should I look more into houdini?

Cathodeus

I know that max can generate a strip at Boolean intersection if user add a EditSpline on top of Boolean. So do your union than clone than add spline modifier. From that spline you should be hable to generate needed geo for decal or additional modeling. Or Retopology ^^

musashidan

Are you baking all this down? You could do this in blender by baking the bevel shader on pre unwrapped penetrating cylinder clones and then apply and bake the welds using decal machine. You don't even need a highpoly. You can project the open ends of the cylinder intersections onto the perpendicular cylinders and use those end edgeloop borders as targets for decal machine. DM takes care of normal transfer.

Mark Dygert

Joker Martini has a script called welder. It's pretty kick ass, I like it.

https://jokermartini.com/product/welder/

poopipe

Cathodeus said:

I know that max can generate a strip at Boolean intersection if user add a EditSpline on top of Boolean. So do your union than clone than add spline modifier. From that spline you should be hable to generate needed geo for decal or additional modeling. Or Retopology ^^

That works quite well, I made a tool that did it similarly a while ago. 
It basically goes like this... 

Boolean, select borders, convert to renderable spline....

Youll probably want to normalise the splines if you have high res geometry or they get quite messy. 
My script copied the uvs generated for the splines into vertex colour and baked them  as a direction map for weld bead creation in designer