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3D & Animation 3ds Max: Disabling Auto-Simplification during Boolean

Nightingale

Grizzled Veteran
Sep 15, 2010
872
64
Vancouver, Canada
How do I stop 3ds Max from trying to simplify my operands when I perform a Boolean operation? I'm trying to do work with 48-sided circles, but it constantly turns them into 24-sided ones! It's very frustrating when you have no idea how you might prevent that from happening.

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By the way, could someone refer me to a good forum for 3ds Max beginners? I've looked on things like Polycount and CGsociety, but their help forums don't seem to have many more replies to topics than TWI's forums, so I just keep posting here hoping someone will see it and reply with a solution.
 
I understand what you're trying to do, but you're going about it in a very difficult way.

First of all, booleans usually give you undesirable results in regards to topology. For this alone, I avoid them. Not to say they don't have their uses, but I personally like the control of placing verts and loops where I need them, rather than on what max seems to think is correct.

Secondly, why don't you just create a 48 sided cylinder for the floor piece and just weld the verts from the 'wall' piece with that of the floor? It would be much easier than dealing with the cleanup required for most Boolean operations.

As for the forums question, I'm not too sure. I know polycount can be pretty advanced in most of the stuff that's discussed, but it really is good info that should be read. They have a section dedicated to UDK as well, which will be a good resource for you. For more basic max usage, try checking out the auto desk website, they should be at least able to get you familiar with the tools and navigation.
 
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Actually, I was just trying to cut the ring into quarters so I could remove the unnecessary pieces. But if it is as you say, using booleans creates really bad poly placement for complex objects, then I should try to do this another way. So far, the only way I've been doing this is making big cubes and using the boolean subtraction to turn my toruses and cylinders into quarters.

I'll give Polycount another look though. Thanks, TrampledUnderFoot. :D You've been very helpful.
 
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... I honestly have no idea how to cut this ring into quarters without Boolean. How do I do that? :confused:

If I got it right, you have a ring mesh and want to cut its segments into seperate meshes.

Let's say you create a ring (torus) in 3ds. Doing so, you can modify several parameters of that ring on the panel to your right (radius 1, radius2, ..., segments. You can see the segments and how they change if you modify the parameters best in the top view viewport. Choose the number of segments that fit your future model - of course the number should be dividable by four if you need quarters.

Now right-click your model and select "convert to editable poly".

On the toolbox (right) you see tabs on its top. Click the modify tap. Now you will see a panel named "selection" containing red symbols (Vertex, Edge,...).

Click on the "polygon" symbol, it has to be yellow in the background to be active. In your top viewport you can now select the polygons that will be your quarter ring. The selected polygons should be highlighted in red.

In the right toolbox look for the panel "edit geometry". In this field click on "detach" and give the detached segments a name, e.g. "Quarter 1". (I don't mark any of the checkboxes).

On the panel "selection" click on "segments" again so that it does not have a yellow background anymore.

That's it, now you have your quarter ring as a seperate mesh. If you need all four quarters as seperate meshes, detach them one after the other following this method.
 
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If you model a sewer you also will encounter the problem of intersecting cylinders.

If you google "model a detailed high poly fire hydrant in 3ds max" you will find four video tutorials from cgtuts that you can download for free, covering the creation of a hydrant using cylinders.

They helped me understand several problems regarding poly modelling. I only once tried to export a few models into udk, but I soon realized that you really should not use boolean, because it completely screws up your geometry - even if the mesh seems ok in wireframe mode, very often you will see weird unexplainable shadows in udk.

Good luck on your work!
 
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I'm doing all my "subtracting" using the pro cutter object under object creation/compound objects. Make a cube larger then the object needing cut. Line the edge of the cube up to the "cut line". Select the object needing cut. Select pro cutter under compound objects. There are three check boxes, something about inside or outside something else. Check the bottom check box only. Then press the pick stOck object. Click on the cube, it should disappear along with the contents inside the cube. If satisfied, right click and convert into editable poly. If you don't convert, the object you cut remains complete, just partially hidden, and if you move it...hard to explain on my iPhone at work.
 
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