Boolean difference and modeling
 

Hey, I'm somewhat new maya (2weeks), have done a few online tuts and such but still majorly getting a hang for the ins and outs of modeling. Have a good deal of autocad experience but it hasnt seemed to help as much as I had hoped.

So my question is this (I searched the forums but didnt see this, sorry if its been answered ad infinitum): I have a cube, then take a cylinder, stick it inside and do a boolean -> difference, the result is of course whats in the following pic.

http://i235.photobucket.com/albums/e...difference.jpg

That part works fine, how do you model it so that when you apply a smooth or a higher poly count to it that it doesnt close up. How would you differentiate between a smooth edge going into the cylinder and a harder 90 degree edge? Is this the proper way to model this?

Thanks in advance for any replies. :)

Booleans are rubbish :). Use NURBS if you want to do this cleanly and easily.

Look into Trim tool, planar tool, Fillet Tool, curve projection, curves on surface.

Basically what you want to do is get a nurbs plane and project a circle onto the surface and then trim the surface making a hole. You can then use duplicated versions of your original curve to give your hole depth, duplicate it off the surface and create depth, Fillet would be used to make it smooth etc.

making something like this :

http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/562/holeck3.jpg

Thanks!

I followed your instructions, but ran into a bit of a hitch trying to get the depth, then searched around a bit more for something that could help me. Since I now knew the tools I was looking for I found this tutorial (here) which told me the piece I was missing for the loft (the trim edge).

[QUOTE]Originally posted by LauriePriest
[B]Booleans are rubbish :). Use NURBS if you want to do this cleanly and easily.

Is it even possible to get a clean mesh with booleans? I guess if I used a shape with minimal sides, but still way more work than with nurbs.