🧵 Why are booleans so fucking gay?
Anonymous at Fri, 4 Apr 2025 21:01:02 UTC No. 1010610
I have been trying to fix the topology for a Boolean operation, and this is the best I can do. The 3ds max tool set for making booleans is already ass since it triangulates my entire mesh and I spend the whole night requadding manually. Booleans are so gay. Homo even.
Anonymous at Fri, 4 Apr 2025 21:44:31 UTC No. 1010613
>>1010612
At least he knows how to make a fucking doughnut
Anonymous at Fri, 4 Apr 2025 22:10:50 UTC No. 1010616
>>1010612
Making a doughnut doesn't teach me how to make a boolean
Anonymous at Fri, 4 Apr 2025 22:26:24 UTC No. 1010617
What’s a Boolean? Is that Latin for boob?
Anonymous at Sat, 5 Apr 2025 05:22:28 UTC No. 1010623
>>1010617
Nah, we just all hate leanne
Anonymous at Sat, 5 Apr 2025 07:09:14 UTC No. 1010626
>>1010616
You could make the donut hole with a boolean
Anonymous at Sat, 5 Apr 2025 12:13:43 UTC No. 1010637
>>1010616
But it teaches you how to make a doughnut
Anonymous at Sat, 5 Apr 2025 12:15:41 UTC No. 1010638
>>1010615
3d donuts don't have topology? Do you really don't know how to do a donut don't you?
the chair nerd at Sat, 5 Apr 2025 14:41:39 UTC No. 1010643
>>1010638
Bitch donuts are my kryptonite.
the chair nerd at Sat, 5 Apr 2025 14:43:36 UTC No. 1010644
>>1010610
>>1010616
But joke aside anon what do you want to model? I 'll teach you.
Anonymous at Sat, 5 Apr 2025 17:59:14 UTC No. 1010655
in art school i was trying to use booleans to put windows into a sky scraper. i asked my instructor for tips because i was having trouble(using maya btw). after giving me some piinte4s about my problem he leaned in close and whispered
>real modellers dont really use booleans
Anonymous at Sat, 5 Apr 2025 20:41:36 UTC No. 1010660
>>1010655
>real modellers dont really use booleans
Boolean is simply a mathematical expression for adding, intersecting, or subtracting volumes or areas. To say that booleans aren't useful is like saying that professional authors don’t use the letter "n" in their books—it's just a basic tool in a 3D modeler’s arsenal.
Booleans are still valuable for certain types of modeling, especially in architectural design. For example, a wall with a window opening doesn't require edge loops or a consistent poly count. However, placing windows on a high-rise using a boolean operation is inefficient; a parametric or modular approach is better. Spline-based booleans are excellent for creating urban grids and similar structures.
In hard surface modeling, booleans can be used to quickly establish a preliminary volume before retopologizing. Furthermore, CAD or NURBS-based programs rely heavily on booleans, as they are designed to define geometry using numerical data rather than just polygons. Answer cleaned using ai cuz im lazy.
Anonymous at Sun, 6 Apr 2025 02:39:39 UTC No. 1010666
>>1010644
Cars. The pic i uploaded was supposed to be those stupid circle things that hold the roof lining in place
Anonymous at Sun, 6 Apr 2025 11:04:21 UTC No. 1010686
>>1010666
You can just use intersecting geometry unless you need it to be integrated for some reason
Its called a trim clip btw
Anonymous at Tue, 8 Apr 2025 03:57:22 UTC No. 1010743
>>1010610
It's the quickest way to cut the hole with some control. The resultant topology is your problem to deal with.
Anonymous at Tue, 8 Apr 2025 05:47:52 UTC No. 1010749
>>1010660
The whole problem with booleans is they're meant to deal with volumes but in cases like OP's are used on meshes, which aren't volumes but manifolds so a lot of guesses and compromises have to be made, they wreck topology and the result might be a broken mesh. So they're not just a tool, they're the wrong tool for the job and the idiot dev who thought they'd work on a 3d mesh all the way back in 3DS1 should be laughed at (he made this mistake because it works fine on 2d meshes but it's the 2d equivalent case to 3d volumes, not 3d meshes).
If you're working with a true volume repesentation on the other hand (voxels or SDF or whatever) they just work wonderfully out of the box.
Anonymous at Tue, 8 Apr 2025 06:41:47 UTC No. 1010751
>>1010749
Any mesh without holes has a proper volume "inside of it". It's just bad/buggy boolean algorithms problem, not some kind of theoretical limitation.
It works "wonderfully" with distance fields and voxels because it's easy, because you raytrace or quantize the shit of it and don't have to care about accurate surface of the volume.
Anonymous at Tue, 8 Apr 2025 07:06:58 UTC No. 1010752
>>1010751
>Any mesh without holes has a proper volume "inside of it".
Wow you should tell that to allcthe math nerds that have been writing papers about that problem for years, they could use your wisdom on whatis actually a hard problem.
In the meantime you can look up the Klein bottle, which is the classic nerd example of a mesh that satisfies the stuff you said yet is a hard problem for all boolean algorithms (it's a mesh that trivially breaks the property of inside/outside)
Anonymous at Tue, 8 Apr 2025 07:22:19 UTC No. 1010753
>>1010752
I'd say it has a hole. Anyway that's a topology nerd example, not everyday 3d stuff. Which is not really a math area because they like to work with ideals, with nice smooth functions and such.
3d meshes and their volumes are the opposite of that, they're basically giant adhoc piecewise functions in space that would be impossible to work with manually on paper, it's all applied math / compsci stuff, completely outside of pure math interests.
the chair nerd at Tue, 8 Apr 2025 20:05:12 UTC No. 1010767
>>1010749
3ds max has an imprint option for booleans tools. it works on non volumetric objects but it carries the nasty logic of converting the nodes involved into reference geometry and the result into collapsed geometry. The best option is to model them poligonally using some spline reference for example, booleans pack a lot of unnecesary destructive logic that collapses the mod stack.