Who uses booleans?

scourgewarper

I was reading a thread about a student who's tutor said if you expect to work in the CG industry you HAVE to use booleans. Obviously that's absurd, everyone has a different workflow. But booleans are notoriously unpredictable, I say this as a max user I don't know how effective it is in other apps, so I was just wondering how often people use it in their daily workflow?

I rarely use it but in editors like UnrealEd its used quite a bit albeit on a much simpler level. That uses CSG/BSP etc so I don't really know if thats different from how 3ds max handles it.

Generally when I perform a boolean, say subtracting a cyclinder to punch a hole in a flat square polygonal surface of a model, I will detach all the surface polygons that wil make contact with the cylinder first, perform the boolean on it, perform an STL check then re-attach to the main model.

For me this generally tends to limit any problems from the boolean to just the polygons that are detached from the the main model. How do you guys handle booleans?

LEViATHAN

Usually, removing the end faces of the object you want to substract results in a cleaner result. I have no problems using boolean for complex geometry, but for simpler operations I prefer to do it manually.

MoP

ProBooleans in Max 2008+ (or was it added in an earlier version?) is pretty nice, it's much less fussy and unpredictable than default boolean operations.

That said, I don't use them much if at all for the majority of my modelling work. I imagine there will be some people who use them more, but it's not like you absolutely need to use them for stuff.

AshleyTayles

I use Max 9 with Proboolean. But it depends on complexity.

scourgewarper

ProBoolean is definitely more stable than the standard boolean, I also check other things such as all verts are welded, no self intersecting faces, no open edges, no two sided faces etc but STL check pretty much does that for you, those tend to be the main culprits for dodgy boolean results.

renderhjs

I havent used booleans in 3-4 years? - I dont like the workflow and often the results. When using with Rhino or Nurbs its a whole different story then its basicly as common as lets say extruding in polygon modeling.
But for polygon modeling I would say it could be as well as ditched in most cases

danr

i use them to cut shapes out of faces where i want a standardised size - doors, windows etc. But that's about it

Mark Dygert

Already covered but ProBooleans if you need to Boolean anything. James Haywood wrote a script called Clean Verts which helps remove those added verts.

For most small things you can normally get away with floating geometry, at least for normal maps. High poly work, you're probably going to need to create it by hand or ProBoolean it.

It also helps to make sure your geometry is closed before Boolean'ing. The STLCheck modifier helps with that. It's also a smart idea to reset Xform, collapse the modifier stack and in cases of extreme weirdness, create a box, attach your object and then try boolean'ing again.