I’m having issues with getting boolean difference to work. I am building a treasure chest for 3D printing and I wanted to hollow out the inside (so I could print some plug-in pieces that looked like gold or something).
I build the outside of the mesh just fine but now I am just trying to subtract some volume inside it. I made a smaller profile that I want to subtract to give the inside of the top of my treasure chest some contour.
However, when I use boolean->difference it is working like a union function instead. I even converted all my n-gons to tris thinking that would help. But it didn’t.
I also had issues splitting the treasure chest into two (lid and base) just using a simple plane to cut it in two.
I put a copy of the .blend up on my Google Drive here. I am using Blender 2.8 as released on 3/8/19.
I’m at work so I can’t check out the blend file. I don’t know much about 3D printing, but is there a reason you modelled the chest and lid as one piece? You shouldn’t need to ‘cut it in two’ as they probably should’ve been modelled as two pieces anyway.
It may be handy to upload a pic of your model for ppl like me that can’t grab your file, but may be able to give suggestions by seeing the piece
If I apply a Boolean modifier to Chest, and select Chest.005 as the object then the default Difference operation works fine and cuts out just a bit into the chest. I don’t see which object you were trying to use as a cutter to remove the main volume of the chest if that’s what you were doing.
Chest - Chest.005 is really simple, you just select Chest, add modifier, Boolean, and select Chest.005 as the “Object” in the modifier to subtract from it.
but is there a reason you modelled the chest and lid as one piece? You shouldn’t need to ‘cut it in two’ as they probably should’ve been modelled as two pieces anyway.
For 3D printing everything that you want to print needs to be one whole mesh (fully manifold) or else it prints very wrong.
I modeled it as one piece and printed it, then thought it would be cooler if I had the lid opened. Instead of modeling everything from scratch I just wanted to cut the mesh up into two halves.
If I apply a Boolean modifier to Chest, and select Chest.005 as the object then the default Difference operation works fine and cuts out just a bit into the chest. I don’t see which object you were trying to use as a cutter to remove the main volume of the chest if that’s what you were doing.
I assumed the .blend file would keep everything visible like I saved it. In case it wasn’t clear I have the modifier on “Chest.004” and I am using “Chest.005” as the cutting tool.
It might have kept the drill piece, this sometimes makes it look like it fails.
It is not that. When I apply the modifier it acts like a Union instead of Difference.
Welp…it turned out to be stupid simple. Someone on Reddit asked me to double check my normals. I knew I fixed them on the base object…but I forgot to do so on the cutting object.
It looks like maybe you already managed to apply an Intersect Boolean to the two objects, so the cutter and the cuttee were at exactly the same points. I scaled up Chest.005 by just a tiny bit and it started working. You need to hide Chest.005 after that to see the result.
