Hey All,

Does any one know why booleans were taken out of 6.5? I really miss them.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

Hi Nate,

There were a bunch of SOPs that have been “deprecated” in 6.5. Boolean was deprecated in favour of the Cookie SOP. Your hip files containing Boolean SOPs should still load fine, but the Boolean SOP itself has been hidden from the interface to discourage its use since we no longer plan on supporting it.

Take care,
George.

Yep, Cookies work better in almost all cases. Its far more reliable than the Boolean SOP and can do more.

Ok I will start using it. I have never really used the Cookie SOP I will read up on it in the PDFs

Thanks Guys,
Nate Nesler

cookie looks good, and a cooler name than boolean

has anyone got a tip on what to do after the cookie - i cut a smaller cube from a larger one, and neither polybevel on the edges or subdivide work, they just make a mess. i tried all the options with the cubes, geometry types and the checkbox to fuse the points (cant remember that name right now!)

Mark,

What is it that you are trying to do?

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

Hi Nate,

ideally subdivide/smooth the result of the cookie operation, and/or bevel the edges of the result - depending how close to camera it will be

cheers!
Mark

Mark,

Try appending a facet SOP after your cookie. Set make normals unit length, Consolidate points fast, Remove degenerate, and post compute normals, in the Facet Sop to clean up the result of your cookie. To be extra anal-retentive, you might want to either dissolve visisble edges or split faces in the resulting geometry before appending the facet SOP so the faces are all quads. After that you can bevel or subdivide away no problems.

Hey Mark,

Hummm Well I might have an eaiser method. Yeah all you have to do is ummm polysplit to make a quad from the one line it creates from the Cookie OP into 4 sided polyfaces. Quads/4 sided poly faces is what you want because they will smooth properly. There is a technical reason why Quads smooth properly and not triangles. It has to do with faces being generated from a single point in a triangle where as they are not in a quad. Anyhow here are too images to illustrate what I mean.





I hope that illustrates what I mean by that. If you find you have a triangle that you need to make a quad you can do another split to make two triangles and then dissolve the line in between the two triangles and now you have a quad where you had only a triangle. Its a good trick I use alot.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

Oh I take that back I guess I am just illustrating further what MichaelC was saying. Yeah I am thinking along the same lines as he is.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

MichaelC that facet sop is exactly what i needed! thank you! and to Nate.

cookie, facet with those options above, polybevel on edges, edgecusp, voila a nice looking boolean object. subdivide still didnt work well even after polysplits to give it form, ill investigate the dissolve visible edges option couldnt find it at the time, cheers and thank you!!

Dissolve visible edges is not an option. I was refering to the dissolve tool.

When you do a cookie, it does a good job, but often it won't leave you the the topology of visible edges you want. It may create some edges you don't want or not create edges you do want. You want everything divided and laid out nicely, preferably in quads.

To quickly rearrange the topology of area of the cookie operation you only need two SOPs.

You use the PolySplit SOP to basicly create visible edges, and the dissolve SOP to hide visible edges. If you select a visible edge on your model and do a Dissolve on it, it's the equivalent of hiding or making an edge invisible in other programs.

In a nutshell, Polysplit and Dissolve are your best friends for cleaning up geometry. Use them to rearrange your topology into quads after cookie operations. Facet is also a really good friend. If ever you are modeling and things start getting wonky or you are rendering and the surface isn't shading correctly, append a facet with the options I wrote above and it will more than likely fix your troubles.

thanks again MichaelC, i'll play around some more - i always got put off booleans because of other apps problems with them, but they are a great way to model intricate shapes.