making holes with the Boolean difference

# 1 03-01-2014 , 03:34 PM

Registered User
Join Date: Dec 2005

Posts: 84

Hi everyone

I am making a model of a petrol engine, I am doing the cylinder head and I am stuck on making holes for the valves etc, I am using the Boolean difference command, but once I get more then about 5 holes if I do the sixth hole, the head just disappears, in total I have between twenty and thirty holes I need to make. I have tried making the head up from four blocks and joining them together, but then it only lets me make about three holes and when I go to make the forth hole the same thing happens.
If anybody has got any ideas I really need to hear them, there is a link below if anybody would like to see the file.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9h...it?usp=sharing

Thanks for reading.

Trikeman

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# 2 03-01-2014 , 05:51 PM

Technical Director
Join Date: Feb 2004

Posts: 2,988

Booleans don't really work in Maya. Try deleting the history of both objects before trying the difference. If that doesn't work, you'll probably need to do them by hand. They're extremely temperamental.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

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# 3 03-01-2014 , 06:19 PM

Moderator
Join Date: Jan 2004

Location: Michigan, USA

Posts: 2,998

You might want to fix your google drive link. It's asking people to send an access request, I cannot offer assistance until I see what you are trying to create.

Regardless of what others will say Booleans can be very useful and save you a great deal of time; however, they are not the EASY BUTTON.

They are a staple for NURB's modeling; however, for polygon modeling they have some major restrictions that limit their usefulness.

You must plan your initial geometry carefully so that you can minimize the messy geometry they can produce and minimize the time you have to spend cleaning up the geo.

Maya's implementation, in general, is poor and has a long list of rules you need to be aware of but are, unfortunately, poorly documented. They can often break even when you think you have met all the proper conditions causing you to waste lots of time trying to sort out a problem that in the end just cannot be resolved.

So most people will just advise you not to use them.

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

Last edited by ctbram; 03-01-2014 at 06:23 PM.

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# 4 03-01-2014 , 06:21 PM

Moderator
Join Date: Jan 2004

Location: Michigan, USA

Posts: 2,998

Looks like ND and I were responding at the same time.

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

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# 5 03-01-2014 , 07:39 PM

Registered User
Join Date: Dec 2005

Posts: 84

Thanks to NextDesign and Ctbram, for their input, I messed up with the link to my Google drive, I have tested this link and it seems to work, it did ask me to reload the file, but when I clicked on download the second time and it download.

If I can’t use Boolean, how else could I make lots of holes in a thing like this, I need valves, the ports of inlet exhaust, loads of studs and more.
Thanks again
Trikeman

The new link is
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9h...it?usp=sharing

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making holes with the Boolean difference

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