Booleans Union Problem
 

Dang, I post alot of help threads lol.

Well, let me get straight to the point. I'm following the four video free tutorial concerning creating a cartoon dog, and so far everything is going relatively well, except for one issue. I just finished converting the leg from a Nurbs cylinder to polygons, and after shaping it correctly and merging the 6 or so polygons that were on the tip of the toe, I attempted to boolean --> union the leg with the body/head (both were already merged succesfully). Unfortunately, every time I did this, the leg and the body would dissappear (not get hidden, but turn into a new polygon shape in the outliner and dissappear completely in the windows. I then cleaned up some of the polygons that made the leg connect to the body (after undoing the union) and then attempted to union again. This time the two parts merged, but the tip of the toe magically was attached to the middle of the dog's torso. I can't understand why this happens, but it always does happen. I attached an .mb file that shows the problem if that may help someone figure out whats wrong. Help would be greatly appreciated here, as I can't continue on in the tutorial without figuring this out.

PS I am also unable to ever have wireframe on shaded in effect, I click it in the shading menu, but it never does anything. Not a huge issue, but still quite annoying.

(Taken from polygon and sub-d forums since that section doesn't seem to be viewed often)

Thanks so much.

Well, I guess no one is able to help me with the above problem, but what can ya do. Anyways, I was going to start a new thread with another booleans union problem that I am having, but instead of doing that I figured I would just post it in this thread instead.

The problem is as follows: I am following a set of tutorials from lynda.com that I downloaded onto my comp. I am now in the modelling section of this tutorial where I need to do a booleans union on a loft surface and a body to create a mouth for a robot. Each time I do this, weird deformations occur. Once, the body stayed in place but the box (created out of curves being lofted) would merge at an odd angle. The next time (after I exited the program and reopened the file) the whole lower body dissappeared and the mouth turned from a box into an arc shaped object. It is so frustratingly annoying, as I am following the tutorial instructions exactly but getting abnormal results. I will attach the before and after .mb files. Hopefully you will be able to figure out what the heck is wrong here :)

Anyone who could help with this would be greatly appreciated, as I don't want to move on in the tutorials without completing this.

Here is the after .mb file.

It sucks that the one problem that is bugging me the most seems to be the hardest one to fix :headbang:

EDIT: I did a search on the forums (something I should have done first) and may have found a solution to my problem. Someone else faced exactly the same problem (well, almost) that I am facing and was able to fix it. Hopefully, it will work for me as well.

OK, to fix my problem I guess what I need is someone to answer how to do this: "You need to use a "closed" surface, in your case a 6 sidebox vice the 4-side shape you're trying to use now." The thread that I am referring to in which the problem was solved is located here

I'm new to modeling myself so I can't be of much help but if you'll watch the cartoon dog tutorial throughout you'll see that the author had the same booleans union problem when attatching the dog's rear leg. What he did was use the split polygons tool to cut out an opening in the dog's body similar in size and shape to the leg portion that is to be attatched. He then simply merged vertices to complete the union. Basically, the same thing as a boolean union only you do it manually and without the boolean operation but it still ends in the same desired effect.

From what I gather, boolean operations are nice as they often save you lots of time, but by nature don't always work as you intend them to. I'd suggest learning to do it the long way (cutting a hole with split poly tool then attatching via merge vertices) first so that you won't be handicapped when your boolean union fails again. At least that's what I've been doing. I started by using simple primitives to practice the operation on and have since moved on to more complex poly shapes.

But like I said, I'm a newbie at this as well so take what I say with a grain of salt. I don't want to inadvertantly give anyone bad/wrong advice as I'm nowhere near qualified to be giving advice at all. It's just that no one seems to have replied to your post and I thought I'd offer what little help I could. Good luck and I hope you can find an answer to your problems soon.

Y'know, that's a very good idea. I had the same problem with the dog's front leg (as is mentioned above) so learning how to use the split polygon tool and the rest of the things you mentioned would probably be my best bet.

Thanks for responding to my post and offering your help, it should be very... "helpful" :D