The Ultimate Boolean Guide | Blender/Max

hello in this video i'm going to show different types of boolean modeling i've been seeing inside 3ds max but this information is also used for blender of users as well so here i've got pretty much five types so this is the basic setup so i've got this object i've got two of these boxes two of these smaller boxes and these will be subtracted difference and i've got these four solders that will be added union all right so here's the first method boolean plus chamfer slash bevel modifier in 3ds max we call chamfer and blenders known as bevel so pretty much what we're going to do is to just use boolean on them and apply a chamfer modifier so that it's not perfectly sharp here let's look at the pros and cons as you can see i have the benefits and downsides of all the methods so it's very fast cons are it's not for film because there's very messed topology here lots of triangles and n-gons so it's not suitable for film cinematics needs tweaks to fix the channel for bevel issues whenever you use this method you always have to fix some small issues so that the channel for three smacks or bevel and blender will work well without any kind of issues and sometimes it can take some time and the topology limits the chamfer bevel size so if you want a huge chamfer here it's not really going to be possible because of the topology all right next one is we have boolean plus shader chamfer and bevel so this method is pretty much similar to this one except we're going to do all of the beveling or chamfering at render time with a special shader so if i isolate this and i do a render notice how at render time we get that nice chamfer without having to spend any time setting it up with chamfer modifier bevel modifier if i go into material properties here is what i'm using i'm using v-ray so use v-ray edges texture if i simply turn this off we can see the before and after so this is with the shader and this is without the shader you can see it makes a very nice difference we can always go into the material properties and change it so right now using a radius of 0.8 centimeters if i use point 3 for example make another copy you can now see the difference between no chamfer 0.3 and 0.8 so no hassle just boolean and apply it by special chamfer shader and the great thing about this is that we only have the union so for example if i create a box or anything else and i simply position it so it's intersecting with this geometry let's say like this i don't have the union in it i just have to give it the same material and so notice what happens everywhere that it's intersecting so notice how right now we're not quite getting it in the corners but that's because if i go into the settings i have to turn off consider same object only if i turn that off make a clone and re-render you will now notice that we get a nice chamfer even in these areas so even though the object is not even unioned we still get nice chamfers in between so that's a very nice benefit is it gives us a lot of flexibility we can just easily move this around it's much faster even using booleans because with booleans no matter what program you use the more you have the morals start to slow down in this situation you don't have to union or bullying anything we can just have it be a separate object all right so pros this is the fastest method you don't have to tweak anything here it's just do a quick boolean it's great for fast visualization as i just showed you you can just move around objects and see what it looks like with a nice chamfer here the cons are it's not for film and you have a uniform channel for bevel size from which i am controlling all the chamfers and all the sharp corners with just a single value here so don't get to really change the chamfer for different areas next we have boolean plus manual topology fixing so the pros this is the gold standard for film and cinematics and it's very clean and efficient so to show how to go about that i've also created this right here so basically if i'm going to be using this method i'm going to manually fix it up i'm going to change how i plan things out so even though all the objects i start with this sphere i start with a sphere just like this and this is really bad because what we have here is all these triangles which is really bad for modeling and subdivision so if i'm going to use this method what i would do is do this i would start with a sphere but have it be an 8 segmented sphere very simple then i will remove these edges to make it all quads apply turbo smooth to subdivide it apply spherified just to make a little bit more perfect of a sphere and then i have a much better object here so that will for example delete and extrude the bottom half and scale the top half to get this shape so now i get a much clearer topology for fixing up then i would do the boolean and fix it up and to give you a quick preview of that i will also need to think about how i treat these other objects so i'll give you a quick preview of what that entails so first thing i would do is really think about how many sides the cylinder should have so right now it's 32 which is fine for the other methods but not this method because if you're just going to plan out in your head how you're going to connect things together you notice that 32 sides is way too much you will have a very hard time trying to connect them together and it's going to be not very smooth this is all going to change its shape because we have a lot more edges going through here so if i switch it down to 8 you notice that's way too simple 12. kind of plan out we're going to cut things 12 is good and 16 will be good amounts so let me go with like 14 or maybe just 12. so you notice how i plan things out a lot more if i'm going to do it the manual method so then i would blend it together all right and what i would also do is just work on one fourth of this then just use symmetry for the other areas so in order to fix this up i would do things such as weld connect and for example cut as well so would just go around here and figure out topology to get good results like this the cons are that this is the slowest method and it requires the most knowledge and experience with topology in order to do a good job however it is the lowest polygon count if i turn off open subdiv so this method is about 15 and a half thousand this method is about 2 300. this method is about 750 this one is close to 10 000 and this one is 6 000. this one is the most clean efficient and the lowest poly we can also use preset to change how sharp different areas are so if i go into preset you notice i have four different sets so if i right click and select it you can see these edges are set one these are set two these are set three and this single edge is set for so i can very easily change how sharp different areas are so give you some nice control over that as well and if we zoom the camera in closer we can simply keep increasing iterations until it matches how much detail we want so further away we can have for example just one if we need further detail up close we can just increase that number we can also have this be off in the viewport to keep things nice and efficient and have it activated at render time whereas with these methods if you zoom in closer you'll notice it starts to get very angular here which means you need to increase number of sides on your cylinders just make things smoother all right next we have boolean plus quad remesher and i think 3s max 2021 has a built-in remesher modifier as well so the pros are it's fast and has clean topology suitable for film the cons are that there is some cleanup required and the polycount may be higher than the manual method so here i have three different poly accounts and if you're wondering what this number is it's this right here when you activate quarter mesh you get a target quad count and what you can do is make several copies of this initial mesh so pretty much this right here is just this one just regular boolean and then i switched it to 500 i made several copies i use different amounts for each one and then this one is 1000 so after doing the boolean i will apply a smooth modifier i can change this number to change the smoothing and pretty much what you're going to do is tell quality measure where you want the angles to be and which parts you want to be smooth then i turn off the detect hard edges by angle and just activate use within loops that way i get control over what i want to be smooth and sharp if i want further control i can apply a poly so for example if i want this to be smooth i can select these two polygons and give this a separate smoothing group now quarter measure would treat this as a smooth area so then you would make several copies and try a different quadcop you can also decrease the adaptive size to zero for example try out different target quality counts to get a good result so notice how with 500 it's way too simple it does not properly capture this detail the rest of it looks kind of fine but this is definitely not what we want another problem here is if i want this to be sharp if i want these edges to be sharp for example this would be a problem because i want this to be sharp well i want these to be smooth and so that contrast is not going to work with such simple topology it's not dense enough so 500 is definitely way too low 1000 is a lot better but notice how i have this issue this is what i mean but there's some cleanup required you can fix this for example by using the cut tool removing these edges and then straighten this out so there we go and for the most part it's looking very good but you notice how we have two triangles right here and then this is 2500 it's the best out of all the quality mesh results but there's still some sort of issues you can fix by for example target welding and now it's pretty much perfect however even though this is very good it's still over 2 000 polygons whereas the manual method is under 800. so doing it manually will give you the cleanest simplest results but the speed of quality measure and 3ds max's re-measure modifier cannot be argued with so if you're in a hurry this is a very good substitute for doing it manually and last we have hard mesh or smooth boolean plugins these are commercial plugins you can get for 3ds max and other programs pretty much what they do is they will allow you to boolean subtraction or union and it will pretty much delete this topology and insert this object inside between which maintains its size here so if you look at the pros fast it has even chamfers bevels and fillets so a chamfer studious max bevels for blender and fillets for mulan 3d or fusion 360. so different programs have different names for essentially the same function and it's good for fast product renders so if you want to quickly bring things together and have a nice chamfer affiliate boolean for a product let's say making a 3d product rendering this is a good use for that and so you have even chamfers now one downside about using subdivision is that you'll get different smoothness depending on your topology so for example in areas where the edges are close together it's going to be sharper there in areas where the edges are further apart it'll be a little bit smoother there so crease set can fix that to a degree but you still have to kind of watch your topology otherwise you're going to get sharper areas and smoother areas and to show what i mean i will just show you an example with let's say a plane all right so i'm going to extrude here all right insert a loop and i'm going to move this further apart all right so i'm going to select this actually just apply preset i'm going to select this and create a set and i will give this let's say 0.2 i'll apply open subdiv and give this let's say 4. so even though i'm using a crease an even crease right here because of topology you notice how this part is sharper and that part is smoother so even though you crease the edges with the uniform value it will still give you different results depending on how close your edges and topology is that's kind of a subtle downside of using creasing and television but with hard mesh or smooth bullying or whatever it's called other programs you will get a very even fillet going all the way around so notice how even it is right here and it's all modular and procedural so you can always change it so the way this works i'm using hard mesh i don't think the full version is out yet i'm using a 30 day trial you basically apply different modifiers with what you want to do on it so i have union and i have two difference these four cylinders are done with the first modifier union and then we have a difference modifier that's controlling this and a second one that's controlling this right here and we have separate sizes for all these billets so i can click on the hard mesh union and i can scroll down here and change the size which is the offset so notice how large is right now let me change this for example to 1 or 0.2 and there we go and so if you have a large size if you find that it's just too angular here you can smooth it out using the section spans so right now it's set to nine this is four and this is for example 15. much smoother here so with hard mesh with these types of tools as long as these fillet areas not intersect with each other there will be no issue so if i try to make this too large say 2.5 that's still fine if i do three it's still fine if i try and do four as you notice it's starting to intersect so a similar issue that you get on working with nurbs program such as smaller 3d and fusion 360. but it's still a very powerful tool for polygonal modeling it gives you a nurbs like workflow because just as with nurbs you can select any edge and just fill it with no regard to topology you can now have a similar tool in polygonal programs so if i want to do this i can switch to the second modifier let me try offset1 there you go and so it's a very nice tool you may have to play around some settings to get rid of the issues so the cons are that it's slightly buggy and it's a high polygon count so you may encounter some crashes or bugs when using these tools but if you're careful with it and you know what the limitations are it's a very nice addition to your 3d modeling workflow so this was a look at different types of bullet modeling thank you for watching and take care you

Channel: Arrimus 3D

Views: 30,271

Keywords: tutorial, arrimus, max, blender, 3d, model, modeling, boolean, topology, beginner, fast, easy, simple, how to, ultimate, guide, hard surface, mechanical

Id: bZWuRmd24Cc

Length: 18min 43sec (1123 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2020