A topic that has been covered many times I suppose but I would like to explore it a little more.

Building models, I prefer to use box modeling techniques. When it comes to little details however, the Cookie SOP on the surface is hard to pass up. However, take a large single poly plane (SurfaceA) and subtract from it a capped tube (SurfaceB) and a train wreck ensues. Horrible triangulated normals rear their ugly heads. Also, I can't even begin to grasp how to UV map such geometry.

I would love to get some ideas as to what OPs, tips, trick, alternatives that everyone uses to get around resorting to boolean operations.


on a side note, are there any irc channels out there that i can find some support instead of clogging up the forums?

Depending on what you are after I would make a little subnet asset that copies the detail to selected polys, and orients it to them, deletes those polys and then fills and gaps by skinning between the hole created and the copied detail. Of course if the detail doesn't sit within the bounds of an individual poly then this gets more tricky, but I think you would need to model the original with that in mind.
You can also pull similar tricks by extracting polys extruding them into boxes and then using that as the source for a lattice deformer that will position a detail where the original poly was. I think there's an example of that over on odForce, its just a question of finding it, it was from ages ago…..

sagramor
on a side note, are there any irc channels out there that i can find some support instead of clogging up the forums?

#odforce on irc.freenode.net

if only there were more than zero people on there at any given point. surely i dont have to register my nick to see people… im bad with irc

OK. Facet SOP.

to anyone who is having boolean issues, flipped normals etc….

FACET.

sagramor
if only there were more than zero people on there at any given point. surely i dont have to register my nick to see people… im bad with irc

You must be in the wrong room, I haven't seen it empty in a long time. People don't *talk* in there much unless it's working hours though.