3d Studio blows sometimes..

If your like me and you use 3dmax for more than 7 hours a day you know about the pains of the boolean modifier. But today I really got reamed by it, 16 hours of work into a model, looking just fine. I close it, get some lunch, come back and open it, and it looks like the mesh has been doing some modifying of its own while I was gone. Verts everywhere! I know that damned boolean modifier is to blame. I loaded up some old versions, same exact thing. Bool mod was at the bottom of the stack. Words to the wise: if you need to subract something from a mesh do it the brute force way.

Anyone else have any 3dstudio horror stories? :)

heh, didn't know people used boolean for modeling in games. There's a new boolean called power boolean that was released for subscribers, can't remember if that was max7 or 8. ANd its now been encorporated into 9.

It's actually clever enough to clean up your mesh and not leave a mesh of extra verts where the two shapes that were used intersected.

there's another boolean plugin that workes on open edged geometry too.

I don't have many problems with max these days, they either fixed them or I subconciously work around them, not sure which it is.

Yeah, for the most part I agree with that, this one time it just got me hehe.

I'll look into that power boolean, thanks for the tip ^.^

couldn't find the good examples only one pic.



It used to be called powerbooleans but now its a free extension for subscribers called Pro Boolean extension.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=6172801

Wow. I've always been telling peers "Use boolean and die". But maybe that'll have to change.

You'll find the problem was caused by not doing an x-form reset before the boolean(and then convert to an editable mesh)...nearly every modifier problem you get in max is down to the x-form..also it's best to collapse the stack as often as possible.

Yeah MAX's Booleans are rubbish, it was quite a shock when I started modelling on the PC three years ago to find out that the Booleans rarely worked properly. I used to do some modelling on the Amiga about 15 years ago and the Boolean in Real3D, ya know, worked. Ahhhh Progress.....

heh yeah real3d was a "solid" modeler though and didn't work in quite the same way as other apps of the day like lightwave.

man that was a while back :)

I still use Max4 and the boolean is a bit fudgy.
My work-around is to use the grid and try to keep verts & edges aligned as much as possible before applying the boolean.

I only ever do this a few times though to get the rough shape I need. Once the mesh gets too complicated I just switch to editible mesh and work by hand from that point.

Yeah same. It's too dangerous to use. Also you can use a the cut function of the modifier, which gives you an outline. You can then extrude it or pull it in manually.