Michael & Frenchy,

Thanks for the feedback and assistance. I tried Michael's approach - separating the central object and hiding the coincident sections. Worked like a charm.

Also, part of the difficulty and complexity of the vanes' surfaces is that I did a boolean diff on the vanes first, to make sure the curve of the central object was preserved after removing their volume from the central object. This still seems to be a sticking point - I'm finding a lot of micro surfaces and edges I have to clean up, but at least I'm getting closer to where I intended.

Thanks again to the both of you. This community is yet another reason I'm saving my pennies to buy a seat of MoI.

Hi Satoribomb,

I see now where that particular micro edge/surface came from. Your flange box ended right at a spot creating this kind of a situation between a box and a circular piece:



It's that type of a relation that caused those little slivers in this case.

Often times it is difficult to guarantee that different pieces meet up in a simple way. That's one reason why it is often times a good idea to generally make boolean pieces overshoot each other by a fair margin instead of having cutting pieces try to match exact lengths.

I guess applying that advice to this particular situation would mean extending your flanges like this:



To do that, I extended the box until it was sort of completely poking out through everything on that side. This avoids the micro edges, and the boolean will succeed:



However, you can notice that the coincident/overlapping areas that I showed in red in that earlier post have sort of left some of their edges behind. This is hard to avoid, when there are overlapping pieces it is difficult for MoI to always produce the optimal result that you would like, sometimes different edges of all the pieces will get incorporated into the final result. So to make a really clean result I would still recommend extracting out that central section and doing the cut just on that and then recombining pieces later. Avoiding the overlapping areas just tends to guarantee you cleaner results.

- Michael

One work-around that some people use for objects that won't Boolean because of coincendental
surfaces is to either scale or move one of the objects by 1.005 or so before you do the Boolean,
which positions the surfaces out of tolerance just enough, so that MoI knows which surface goes where. Usually scaling one of them works, but if it's a stubborn one, you might have to move it, too. I had one like that last week that was killing me, so I finally gave up on trying to fix my model and moved one object by .005, and boom, it Booleaned like a champ! When you're modeling for production, you can't always afford to model with "elegance" but to just get the job done. :-) It will look the same to everyone, but you. :-) For jewelry design, it makes no difference in the finished prototype, but I guess for some industries, it could mess things up.
If you try scaling the torpedo in your model by 1.001, the Boolean will work.

-Jesse

Edit: I should add that Michael's approach is the preferred one. The scale/move technique is sort of hack that would be better to use as a last step after all your other modeling work is done.

< completely poking out through everything on that side.
that makes completely sens :)