As you can see, a bunch of unnecessary vertices are added. This tool would be useful to put windows and doors and stuff in walls, but even a simple intersection between two cuboids makes subsurf look really bad, due to unevenness of verts. I know there is another thread on the same page as I post this with a similar name, but he’s talking about wanting an idea for a hole, not topology problems. But about that:
How did he get such a nice result? I see no vertices randomly in between edges or anything! Why can’t mine be that pretty??
There should at least be some way of decimating a mesh similar to how wireframe mode displays your scene; it gets rid of unnecessary edges and anything flat; taking only the verts that actually make a difference in your mesh (where differently angled edges meet) and simplifying it that way, like google sketchup does. But in the meantime, am I doing something wrong? Though that’s unlikely, since there aren’t any parameters in the modifier or the w key operation.
I’m wondering about the feasibility of the current boolean tools as well. To be honest, the “S” that I intersected into the cube (it would make more sense to use the ‘difference’ boolean tool, wouldn’t it?), I thought it turned out looking like crap on top of the cube; the faces are turned into mincemeat on the top, but the actual intersection looks just fine.
So I’m going to look for a way to do things without the booleans, because they tend to screw up the mesh anyway. Either way, I’ll be keeping an eye on both of our threads.
What I don’t understand about your picture is how using booleans on those two cubes you mentioned managed to add unnecessary points and faces, and connect them illogically. I mean, each face is only four verts, so how the hell did a triangle get in there?! D:
I know about fgons already. I rarely use them. And about using intersect and getting the same result as if you had used difference, that’s because you have inverted normals (probably when you extruded your s).
And It makes a really bad modelling tool right now because of this; it can’t even poke a square hole in a cube without adding unnecessary verts! Also, it doesn’t even keep your mesh manifold sometimes. That is the point at which it becomes unusable. It used to give error messages and even crash blender, and it’s still buggy. When it manages to get good and maintain the original mesh topology as much as possible, I’d use it for window jobs.
Yes, Blender booleans are bad. I never use them and never missed them yet - although sometimes you really have to think about how model the mesh you have in mind. However, something as simple as a window in a wall shouldn’t be too hard to make manually.
It might be possible to use booleans as a first approximation to the final result and clean up the mesh afterwards (which might take a lot of time anyway). But as far as I know, Booleans are problematic, even in other 3D packages - Boolean operations are mathematical operations and work fine if you work with mathematical exact mesh representation such as NURBS…but for polygons, it is not that useful. At least not that I know of.
So, there are some basic techniques how to avoid booleans for cutting holes into meshes and stuff, look around here to read about them, I’d really suggest learning them and forgetting (more or less…might be a good idea to still know that they are there) about booleans.
I know the techniques, but they are tedious and require a lot of pre-planning and repetition. I wish you could copy and paste holes like windows and move them along the wall like in google sketchup… or with curves…
