I wasn't sure, but I think you're right...that's why I specified Rhino 3 rather than Rhino 4, but yeah, it seems like MoI is better at booleans than Rhino 4.
Yep, I had attempted to redo something I had started in MOI using the Rhino v4 demo - this was when I was working on that spacestation model - in addition, a simple curve projection onto the sphere didn't work for some reason where in MOI, it was working without a second thought!
I see a lot can be taken for granted when using MOI, which is a good thing because you end up in a modeling bliss instead of running into snags and dealing with annoying little errors and problems!
i haven't had any problems with booleans in Rhino 4. Even with shared edges, faces, etc I have no problems. there were some known issues while in beta, but it seems they fixed a lot of it before release...
Hi Jonah - it took me about 1 minute to come up with the attached simple example. This boolean union with shared surfaces and edges is calculated fine here in the current MoI beta, but fails in Rhino 4.0 (Eval, version 11-Jun-2007).
Strangely, it works fine in Rhino 3.0, so it seems to be an area where there has been some regressions. I don't doubt that they will eventually be able to tune it up, but this simple example should prove that others are not exaggerating above.
Boolean operations are proving to be a particularly strong area in MoI, both in reliability of calculations as well as interface. The ability to have solids and curves interact directly can save extra steps in many simple construction scenarios.
Hi Michael. I hope you don't think I'm knocking Moi in any way. I still plan on buying it for several reasons, and one of them is to get past Rhino's intersection hiccups... So I pasted your test object into a Rhino file in mm units. And yes it did fail. Then i raised my tolerance to .01 and it worked. So i am curious what is the default tolerance of Moi ?
> Hi Michael. I hope you don't think I'm knocking Moi in any way.
Hi Jonah, not at all. I just sometimes see the attitude out there in general that Rhino is all-powerful in modeling and MoI has only a tiny fraction of the power. It's easy for things to be perceived in that way since it is certainly true that there are a lot of functions in Rhino that MoI does not do.
This was just a chance for me to illustrate that things are more complex than a simple "Rhino = powerful, MoI = not powerful" type of generalization.
The tolerance in MoI is 0.001.
That's very interesting that adjusting the tolerance makes it work in Rhino4. But I can't see any reason why it should be necessary - the parts that are touching are very precisely aligned, the overlapping surfaces are exact duplicates of one another (just one is trimmed down) and the edges that are overlapping all come from the same initial curve...
I did an experiment with reconstructing the surfaces and solids completely within Rhino4 from the original curves, to see if that made any difference. However, I was unable to complete all the steps because the boolean intersection between the top slab and the sphere failed in Rhino4 (attached here also), it's another one that works in MoI and also in Rhino3 as well. This intersection failure does not seem to get fixed by adjusting the tolerance like the previous one...
I took a look at this new example file, and the intersection is incomplete where the sphere's seam intersects the side face of the slab. Again back to the intersection weirdness of Rhino. I guess it's true what they say- you fix one thing, and break a few more in the process... :)
