Making the nagative of an object

# 1 23-11-2014 , 06:06 PM

Monkeyboy

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Hi there, I'm new to the forums but I'm trying to get back into modeling to make the most of my student maya license whilst I've still got it.

Anyway I'm working on a project involving taking highly detailed scans, importing them into Maya and then creating a negative of the high poly object in the hopes of 3d printing the result and having it be able to clip onto the original scanned object.

So I've got as far as taking the scan and importing it into Maya and doing some cleanup. I tried booleans to cut the object out of a cube and it just deleted both objects. I ensured all of the normals where in the right place and even divided the cube to have a comparable number of faces to the object but the same problem happened and I've reached the limit of my small amount of boolean training.

So if anyone could suggest an alternative or help me work out where I'm going wrong with what I'm doing it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Monkeyboy

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# 2 23-11-2014 , 07:33 PM

The thin red line
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Could you show a screen shot of the scanned object.............dave

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# 3 23-11-2014 , 09:38 PM

Monkeyboy

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Here's what I'm working with at the moment, it's not what I'll be working with but both are medical scans with the necessary levels of detail so I thought it might be a good place to begin.

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# 4 23-11-2014 , 10:03 PM

The thin red line
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I don't think you have a chance of a Boolean working on such a mesh, I was hoping that the mesh would have been a simpler shape so I could have give some ideas to remesh it, the only thing I can think of is to take it into zbrush and select all the mesh and make a sub tool from the mesh..............dave

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# 5 23-11-2014 , 10:06 PM

Monkeyboy

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That's a good plan, I don't have the software and it didn't even occur but I'll have to see about getting access to Zbrush.

If I'm unable to, could you think of any other solutions?

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# 6 23-11-2014 , 10:44 PM

The thin red line
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What exactly do you need say the inside of the skull...............dave

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# 7 30-11-2014 , 07:18 PM

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If you just make a negative, the objects won't fit together. The tolerances would be too small. You'd have to slightly enlarge the "female" parts, and slightly shrink the "male" parts.

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