[tip/info][Subdiv]Booleans

[Doc.Pock]

was reading through polycount abit and Earthquake posted exactly what i was talking about earlier in the Grozny thread.

here it is.

So, I wanted to touch on something Perna mentioned a while back, BOOLEANS. I've been using them more and more lately, I was always sort of afraid of using them from early days when I really didn't know how to. But for certain stuff they save so much time.

I happened to be modeling a little screwdriver shape so I figured I do some gifs.


1. Block out shapes. Important to use sane number of sides(I used 36 because I want 6 cutouts, so use a divisable number).
2. Make your simple bool cutout thing, I tweaked my base shape so the edges roughly line up with where the boolean will cut, this saves cleanup
3. Cut shape
4. We only need to model 1/12th of this shape, so delete the rest
5. Weld verts, add some supporting edges
6. Mirror, radial clone, and cap edges
7. done, yay

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/499 ... driver.obj

This is a pretty simple shape that I could have done with basic poly modeling, but its so much faster and more accurate to do a quick boolean on it.

[Rhino]

Ye, sub divided models, in later versions of Max I can see potential. Low poly models, especially in earlier versions of max like max9, I would say a very big no in most cases

[Doc.Pock]

yeah. does max9 even have probooleans? also the gif here was made with modo, but the principles apply to any boolean app.

[Rhino]

[Doc.Pock]

wow it actually doesnt look bad at all

[Rhino]

doesn't look "too bad" no, but its very bad

But would probably be ok for SubD but nothing more

[Doc.Pock]

yeah, that was my point. there are techniques for subD that yield equal results much faster, and i wanted to show one here so people can improve on their workflow. (thou the amount of cleaning one should do there is not that much, even if it were to be used as a lowpoly

[Adriaan]

As far as I'm aware booleans are fine as long as you clean up after them, welding down to avoid smoothing errors and close or double verts like in Rhino's example.