3D Modeling Tutorial #25 - Booleans Part 1

hello and welcome to part 25 of my 3d modeling series in this video I'd like to discuss boolean x' and how we can work with them so a lot of people tell you to avoid using boolean s-- the people who say this are usually beginners who aren't that good at modeling so they're kind of scared away by boolean x' and one thing I recommend for you is to not be scared of any features if there is something that you try and it fails horribly don't run away from it try to keep focusing on it until you understand what exactly you're doing wrong so bullying's can sometimes cause strange results but if you simply fix them up the work just fine the good news is that in order to fix the problems created by boolean x' you simply use the same operations that i've already taught you like remove connect and merge vertices weld vertices so let's get started before you start bullying I recommend you create a bunch of different objects that you can use in your boolean operations so a cylinder for example a cylinder a box and I think that'll be it for now so the two key rules and so the thing is I want to keep these off to the side and whenever I need to use one I'll just select it hold shift clone it I'll always keep these on the side so that way whenever I need to use something I don't have to create from scratch it's sort of available for me to use right here so there are two things you should keep in mind when using boolean number one is you want the two objects to have good topology and number two is you want them to be similar in density so I'm going to make this zone right here and I'm gonna make another clone so I want to use this cylinder and cut into this cylinder and that's essentially what a boolean does it has addition Union operations and subtraction as well as some other things so basically let's say I want this cylinder I want to take a cut out of it of course the normal way to do this without boolean's is to you know use the cut operation something like this but the results it might take more time but it might not be as accurate as you would like so that's where bullying is come in handy we're instead going to use a boolean to do that so in case something goes wrong I always recommend you make a clone before you do any boolean operations and that way instead of having to press undo you can simply delete the bad results and work with your clone in a lot of programs undoing and doing complex operations might cause the program to crash and it's not exclusive to 3ds max I've worked with lots of programs that have crashed when I'm undoing or performing some kind of crazy operations so I always recommend instead of using the undo command just create a clone all right so let's make sure these objects are similar in terms of density they're both the 16 sound cylinders so a bad thing to do would be to make this something crazy like 64 sided alright this is a bad idea this is much more dense than this cylinder and eight would probably be a little bit too simplistic you can see why because we got one face here and we've got lots of faces here so 16 they're both the same and they should go well together so to access the boolean operations go here under the create tab and instead of standard primitives click on that and go to compound objects boolean and now this object has now been turned into a boolean object so unlike other modifiers the boolean is not really a modifier it transforms your object it gets rid of all the other modifiers that you have and just puts a boolean right here so we've got several commands here Union intersection subtraction a minus B where this one is a and this one will be B or B minus a or this one is B and this one is a and also got some cut options which simply use this object to cut into this object so the most common one that I use would be Union and subtraction Union combines the two objects together into one object intersection makes it so that you only keep their intersection so this area right here where the intersect is all that you would keep and we've got subtraction so what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on pick operand B and then click on this cylinder and that's the intersection command so it has now create an intersection now I want to go over here and once again Belen this time I'm going to pick subtraction a minus B pick operand B and now it has subtracted that's cylinder from this so let's see how we can go about fixing this up this is some really bad topology here we've got a really bad end gone happening here and we've got a lot of other bad things happening let's go ahead and fix it up all right so one thing we can do right off the bat is use symmetry I can put an edge here I'm going to select this vertex copy its Y position and make it so that these edges also have the same exact let me go ahead and reset my X form forget to do that and I'm gonna make it so that these and just have the same exact Y position I'm going to select these two vertices connect and connect these and now I can simply delete this side so I can save myself the work of having to do the same thing on the other side so first of all this right here if I weld this that would be a bad idea because I have now altered this entire edge and the entire object has been compromised a better solution would be to first put an edge right here so now when I target weld it's only going to affect this edge right here and not all the whole object so that's number one and I'm just going to go ahead and continue fixing up this boolean I'm going to weld this I'm going to weld this and let's see weld this to this select this for the loop through here select these two vertices and okay now I think we all have all quads here to check if you have all quads what you can do is go here under your graphite modeling tools you have freeform selection make sure your under you know polygon for example and right here on the Left we have non quads if I click on that nothing is being selected which means everything is a quad if something was not a quad and I click on non quads it will go ahead and select that so as you can see we now have all quads here and I can apply similar modifier y both x and y flip and when the pace that y-value that I copied earlier there we go and here we are a very nice boolean cut that we've just done now we can combine boolean so I've taught you guys about how to put in control loops or how to work with smoothing groups it's really up to your personal personal discretion if you want to use the good old fashioned method or if you want to use smoothing groups first one go ahead and show you the good old fashioned method which is putting in control loops we're not going to use smoothing groups we're going to put in control loops support loops to make sure it's nice when it's subdivided what you can do here you can either of course manually cut in the edges or you can simply select this and perform an inset operation then delete these edges I mean polygons select these edges why planar and paste in that y-value and let me add a few more control edges and now slow now let's see what it looks like when it's been smooth pretty good and that is how you work with boolean s-- smoothly and effectively of course we can also use the other operation I'm going to go ahead and clone this and fact what I can do is I can go ahead and adjust the pivot at this point okay we'll go ahead and clone this and I'm going to go ahead and delete the last two edit poly modifier and now we can try using the smoothing group option so if I select by angle and select this you can now see it selects the whole thing that's because the angles from here are less than 45 which means it's going to go ahead and select that if I change it for example to 10 it will only select this area so I'm going to make that one change it to 4 let me see 15 okay I just go ahead and select it this way or I can simply do this and then then press ctrl I this and control I to inverse select and I'll give that to and I'll give this one three okay select the smoothing group option surface parameters smoothing groups and there we go that is not a great way of working with boolean smoothing groups okay so those are the basics of using boolean you can use one object and add it to another object or use it to subtract from another object then you can either add the support loops or use smoothing groups so once again make sure that the objects are similar in density and that they have good topology so a lot of people when they're using boolean they make the mistake of using a regular sphere regular spheres have pretty bad topology because they have lots of triangles all congregating here at the top and bottom and you definitely want to avoid this whenever you're doing topology so a sphere a regular sphere is not a good idea when you're using boolean and I'm going to show you a secret primitive that you can use what you basically do is you create a box and you give it the same length width and height properties someone give this box 50 length centimeters 50 width and 50 height I'm going to apply a turbosmooth modifier and give it two iterations and then I'm going to apply modifier called spherify and what that does is it Spira finds an object you can also apply spherify on a simple box and go ahead and give it some segments and when I apply spherify it turns that box into a sphere but I prefer first putting in turbo smooth and then spherify and that will give you a sphere with even quad topology and this sphere right here is a much better choice than this sphere for using with boolean's so I'm just showing you how you can create kind of a hidden object in 3ds Max and this would be a much better choice for boolean's all right so I've shown you subtraction let me show you another type of operation union I'm going to go ahead and Center this to 0 and this as well and isolate I'm going to move this one up and decrease the radius so this is just kind of a pipe object and I can always play around with the sides to maybe get a better result in this case perhaps 12 is better than 16 all those 16 would certainly also work I'm going to go ahead and go with 12 and I'm going to go ahead and okay so right now we've got I'm go ahead and fix up this topology right now we've got this piece right here then symmetry gets applied why symmetry then X symmetry for the other side and then turbosmooth whenever you use a boolean you want to make sure that the object is airtight that doesn't have any holes and your borders right now this object is not airtight it's open so I want it to be closed so that's why I'm going to apply those to symmetry modifiers I'm going to go ahead and select turbosmooth and the two symmetry modifiers and right-click and copy and delete turbosmooth before you apply boolean operation it's a good idea to right-click because rotatable mesh converter edible poly in fact if you're ever working with a model and you find that it's just behaving strangely try converting it to an edible mesh and then back to editable poly so let's go ahead and use the Union operation Union pick operand B and click and now it has become part of the object and it's time for us to do some cleanup first thing is the go is a good idea to select all and your world operation make sure that the world is not too high if your weld that I show this too high you'll end up welding the parts of your mesh that you don't want to be welded so point 1.01 those are good settings and I can go ahead and perhaps delete the left side of this model to save myself the work all right there we go once again I'm going to put a edge here a loop and right here as you can see if I try to use a swift loop right here it's not going to work here and it's going to go only up to here however if I select the edges and then do a connect operation you kind of force the program to accept the loop right there and when the weld here well this did that for an edge here weld weld weld okay and you can perhaps maybe move this down a little bit with the constraint to edge on you can maybe go ahead and move this down that might produce better results because right now you can see these two polygons a little bit distorted they're still quads but they're a little bit too narrow which might produce some pinching right here so you might want to move it down a little bit with the edge constraint on all right let's make sure they have proper smoothing groups that has a smooth before and this has one okay and I'm going to go ahead right-click and paste those modifiers right back I can delete the right side and simply paste those modifiers right back and there we go nice clean results using boolean z' so this is just the introduction to boolean s-- we got a lot more fun coming up so thank you for watching and take care

Channel: Arrimus 3D

Views: 33,318

Keywords: 3D Modeling (Profession), Boolean Data Type, Autodesk 3ds Max (Software), boolean, 3ds, max, 3d, cgi, computer, education, learn, tutorial, walkthrough, arrimus, animation, vertex, edge, polygon, mesh, geometry

Id: eBoHuRoqBGM

Length: 19min 55sec (1195 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 08 2014