Time to Boolean ETC!

 From:  Michael Gibson
2070.2 In reply to 2070.1 
Hi Brian,

> 1. Can it be possible for an explanatory "warning" sign to
> show up if any work proposed is outside of MoIs limits?
> (Instead of the "nil" response!)

I'm not sure if it covers what you're asking for, but it is on my todo list to add a "Calculation failed" type message that will show up when the command failed to produce any result. That will be a message that will show up in the same spot where the "Calculating..." is currently displayed.

This can be a bit finicky to make it work well, to not have text flickering on and off all the time, so it is a little bit more difficult to implement well than what it sounds like. I can probably get that in after more of the object organization stuff is wrapped up.


> 2. Is there a point--needs clarity for me---where the problem
> is not MoI, but rather that the computer system beng used
> is the limiting factor?

No, that is very unlikely. The only situation where this would be the case would be if you were doing a large number of objects or a had a very complex model and ran out of memory. 99.9% of the time that is not the main issue.

Almost all the time the issue is that MoI's boolean calculations have difficulty in certain kinds of situations, like when objects barely graze one another, when objects have a lot of overlapping surface areas instead of pushing more cleanly through one another, when objects have surfaces that have self-intersections or pieces that fold back over top of themselves, complex corner situations with a large number of edges connecting together at a single point, surfaces that are made from curves with stacked up (duplicated) control points, ...

To give the booleans the best chance of success it is good to avoid creating models that have those kinds of situations.

If you have a particular example that you'd like to post I can take a look at it and give you some pointers on what type of thing is causing the problem in that particular case. Or perhaps you're just running into a bug...

- Michael