Working With Booleans To Delete Shared Space in Objects

# 1 08-12-2011 , 03:08 AM

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Working With Booleans To Delete Shared Space in Objects

So I've been getting used to the way that Maya uses booleans lately, and it is quickly becoming a large part of the work that I am doing. However, I am having some trouble with the three types of booleans not working the way I want them to.

I need a boolean that will delete the shared space of two objects when they are put together, without deleting one of the objects. Is this even possible?

So say I have a 2unit thick pipe that intersects with a cube poly. I want the space that these two objects share at the intersection to disappear. I hope this makes sense, as I can't really think of another way to explain it. I will attach pictures if necessary.

Thanks all!

-Cnotey

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# 2 08-12-2011 , 09:54 AM

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Try combining the two pipes then after you have booleaned seperate them..........dave

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# 3 09-12-2011 , 05:54 AM

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Hrm Dave that doesn't seem to work. Maya is telling me that two separate poly meshes have to be selected to boolean them. So I can't combine them and then boolean difference them.

Update: I got it to do what I wanted to do, but the method behind it is not ideal. All I ended up doing was creating a duplicate object a local 0,0,0 and then booleaned the two objects. The the original is deleted, while the booleaned duplicate remained.

This doesn't always work very well, anyone got a better way to do it?

Last edited by Cnotey; 09-12-2011 at 06:03 AM. Reason: Update

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# 4 09-12-2011 , 09:44 AM

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I think Dave misunderstood you or maybe I am. You have two objects A and B. You want to subtract A from B. Where A is the pipe and B is the cube. This is a boolean difference operation. Select B then A then do boolean>difference.

howto-basic polygon boolean operations.mp4 - YouTube

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Last edited by ctbram; 09-12-2011 at 10:08 AM.

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# 5 09-12-2011 , 12:30 PM

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Yes your right Rick I did miss understand.............dave

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# 6 09-12-2011 , 01:46 PM

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Maybe Dave but I am still not sure if I understand either. I thought the same thing when I read the "2unit pipe" bit. But, his response to your post has me more confused. It seems he is describing something more then just the boolean difference. I guess we will know when he watches the video.

It seems to me that boolean difference is pretty straight forward. However, I did not mention that if the surface normals of the two parts are not in the same direction then the booleans will not behvae as expected. So maybe that is what is happening.

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675

Last edited by ctbram; 09-12-2011 at 01:58 PM.

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