>>I got it unioned but now the surfaces are broken and I can look inside ...<<


I dont quite understand.

Are you saying you have attempted to boolean union the "Triangle" to the other main part, and that then tears/breaks the model? If yes, then remove all the faces that are touching for the union, then use join. (if you have a fairly complex shape (such as the triangle) then attempting to union, the coincident faces causes problems).


Re-post the model if I have not understood the problem.


- Steve

Ok, I've got it. you trimmed using 3 lines from the center through the edge points ... now it works.

Hi s7r83dg3, pieces that have surfaces that are heavily overlapping directly on top of each other tend to be difficult for the Booleans to handle.

The reason why is that the Booleans are mostly oriented around one object cutting another object, so they try to process pairs of surfaces and calculate the intersection curves where 2 surfaces intersect.

The problem is, when you have 2 surfaces going over largely the same surface area instead of clearly punching through each other, the intersection curve becomes much more difficult to calculate.

The Join command on the other hand only glues together surfaces where they are touching at unattached edges, it does not try to create intersections between things.

So that's why the approach that Steve is mentioning would help out for your situation here - you've got a lot of pieces that are touching each other, so rather than trying to use a Boolean you can instead delete some of the common faces that are overlapping one another, and then use the Join command to join the pieces that now have exposed edges that touch one another.

- Michael

Actually, I had no problem Boolean union this in MoI it worked quite well, in some cases it is a matter of a picking in a sequence where in this case I would union only two pieces first then picking the next piece and union that and so on.

I guess it doesn't over load the calculations compared to picking the whole lot at once, I use this technique, not only in MoI, when things like this don't happen in one shot, I also use this technique when a string of edges won't fillet in one go.

Cheers

Hi Danny, yeah I've seen some things like that before too where doing things in smaller sets can work better.

When you do it in a large batch, it actually still gets processed in a kind of "2 at a time" manner, but when it processes 2 objects that are not touching each other it ends up with a somewhat more complex intermediate stage that has multiple disjoint solid regions in it. There seems to be some more chance of running into problems after that happens.

In v2 I added some sorting to doing a batch boolean based on object size, so if you have one large object and you are unioning a lot of smaller things on to it, it won't try to pair the smaller objects together (which may not be touching each other at all) and that helps to make that kind of case work better.

But it's more difficult to try and automatically sort a kind of chain of things instead.


It can still be a good idea to use Join when it is possible to do so though, it's just a more simple process and you're less likely to get possible problems like little slivered pieces from things being cut up by the booleans in grazing situations.

- Michael

Hi s7r83dg3,

Hope you dont mind, but I used your curves to build the model (as shown in your first pic). I just wanted to see if MOI could build it as a solid. It came out OK. (I will not keep the model, I only built it to check out MOI V2)





- Steve

Is that stones carving or rim wheel?

Hehe thats ok, I found a photo on the web with this window and rebuilt it. My final render looks like this btw. I hope I don't go to copyright hell now ... sooner or later I'll build an entire cathedral

>>>>sooner or later I'll build an entire cathedral>>>


Maybe she''ll actually visit you if you do!! :o