Hi Michael,
I may faintly remember you speaking to this, but,

If I do a face Boolean with a 2d closed curve on a single face, there is a "default" .5 depth cut in.......

Is this an area you will be adding some additional control, or have I missed how that depth might be controlled...

Hi Burr, the face booleans don't really control depth, instead they can be used to sort of temporarily ignore chunks of the model and only have the booleans interact with just some areas of the model.

I do want to do something in the future for a "limit depth" option for booleans which would then be the kind of thing that you're trying to do in this particular case. But that's somewhat different than an "only intersect with these faces" type mechanism...

The case you have there with the 0.5 depth cut is just sort of a chance thing, when you do a boolean between a solid and a 2D curve it internally extrudes the curve out some distance past the bounding box around the other object which in your case there is just that one face.

So this new "subset boolean" mechanism when used with a 2D curve is still really only about cutting all the way through the target things, not about going to a specific depth yet.

Some things it can work well with though is stuff like only cut through 2 faces making a thin wall like this (2 faces both the inside and outer one you see are selected before doing the boolean difference here):




But notice there that it's cutting all the way through those particular faces, it's not working by being limited by a specific depth value.

So really for doing a boolean difference with a 2D curve as the cutter it's not meant to work with just one outer face of a solid selected like your example, it needs to cut through that face and one behind it to really work properly.

It should be useful more when working with thin walled type objects than just a full big block.

Does that kind of help explain things? I can see that it seems from the result you got there that it is looked like a depth limited thing but really that's just a side effect right now...

- Michael

And really the main thing that I think it would be mostly used for is actually boolean union, not so much for boolean difference. More for stuff like this where you've got a thin walled object:




And then you want to union on some other piece such as this:




But you don't want to include the piece of the handle that's sticking into the inside of the bowl, you only wanted the part going to the outside. Previously to get that you'd need to do some extra prep work steps on the handle to carve off some of it before you would be ready to do a union of it. With the new face subset booleans you can select the handle and then select just the outer face of the bowl and get this result with just one Union operation:




So anyway that's the primary use case. I figured might as well make it work with boolean difference as well because it could be convenient with similar thin walled objects to only cut some spots and not others. But still a cut with a curve is meant to cut all the way through those pieces.

- Michael

ok, thanks. Just a side affect and not really something coming in the future... (well, besides the depth limiting thing your thinking about....)

The extrude faces is working well :)

Hi Michael,

I've just tried to create something similar to your example above, but Boolean Union doesn't seem to work after selecting the bar and the outer shell of the cup-like solid.

I've attached the MoI file.

Thanks,

Metin

Hi Metin, thanks for attaching the problem file. That seems like it should work, I'll investigate why it isn't.

- Michael

Hi Metin, it seems to be getting confused when there are some vertices (ends of edges) right in the intersection zone.

I'll investigate it some more to see if I can make that work better, in the meantime if you rotate your sphere piece in the front view by 90 degrees (as in the attached example file), it should then work ok.

- Michael

Thanks Michael. Glad I could give you a pointer to a possible problem case for the new face Booleans.

Hi Metin,

> I've just tried to create something similar to your example above, but Boolean Union doesn't
> seem to work after selecting the bar and the outer shell of the cup-like solid.
>
> I've attached the MoI file.
>

I've been able to investigate the case you posted, and I've got it fixed up so it will work properly in the v3 final version.

It had to do with some additional processing happening with coincident surfaces (the 2 overlapping planes in your case here) that could end up making some intersection results outside of the subset area, confusing the boolean mechanism.

Thanks for posting the problem file!

- Michael

You're welcome, Michael, and great to read that it'll be fixed in v3. And a tap on the back of the current MoI for not crashing or freezing in such a case.