Hello all,

First of all, I am fairly new to houdini, so my problem may be caused by something I do or don't do, but hear me out.

I have a huge perforated screen, think 7-8m wide with a shit ton of tiny holes in it, anyway I have two parts being loaded with a file node, the outline as a solid geo block and all the holes and geo. I managed to get houdini to polyextrude and eventually boolean the holes from the outline mesh and everything considered, it actually does it somewhat fast and the result looks great!

But that's where the good things stop, somehow I cannot export this geo, as obj, abc, anything. If I export the two parts by themselves before the boolean they work and load fine. The result also exports fine as in houdini writes a file and pretends all is good. But when I try to load lets say the obj in 3dsmax, max gets 75% through the “scanning” of the obj and just crashes to desktop. Rhino6 crashes to desktop and houdini itself gives me a read error when trying to load the same obj it just exported.

Is there something I am missing when dealing with boolean? do I need to convert to something or? everything looks correct and great in the houdini viewport, but I can't get it out of houdini again.

FYI. I am using houdini indie 16.5 (latest production build)

Thank you all!

Does it still fail after triangulation? (Divide SOP)

I think I found the problem, Houdini actually told me I just didn't realise that the error it gave me was so bad. But basically one of the two solids I fed it, wasn't actually a solid and just broken, so houdini would still try and do a decent job, but when exporting all the terrible broken geo would also export and just break.

Once I realised I changed the way I export and import the mesh for boolean in houdini and now everything works perfectly! Thanks though! I haven't tried divide sop yet, but will check it out.