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# 1 07-03-2012 , 07:33 PM
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Boolean Union

Anyone have trouble doing this with NURBS models in Maya 2012? My geometry intersects but no union is created.

# 2 07-03-2012 , 09:40 PM
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There are many rules that determine if Boolean's work or not. All I can say based on the data you have provided is that you must be breaking some rule(s) or the Boolean would be working. With the info you have provided I have no way of knowing what you are doing wrong. You might want to provide some screen captures.


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# 3 07-03-2012 , 10:22 PM
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Can you boolean nurbs? I thought it was poly only.

# 4 08-03-2012 , 12:41 AM
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Yepper, Look under Edit NURB's > Booleans. The tool works differently then the poly version. You pick the tool, then select the first object and press enter, then pick the second object. It is a good idea to add a mental ray approximation surface tessellation node to all booleaned surfaces as seams are a problem at render time with trimmed NURB's. If you crank the tessellation way up to handle the worst case closeup then you will have miserable render times so the approximation node can adjust the tessellation dynamically.


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# 5 08-03-2012 , 12:46 AM
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Okay, I don't use NURBS that much as you probably can guess, and I just assumed that the mathematical constraints of nurbs would make it difficult if not impossible to boolean and get something nice user added image Naive of me.

# 6 08-03-2012 , 01:04 AM
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Don't sweat it NURB's are out of fashion in the entertainment industry. In the 3D CAD and high end surfacing industry they are the primary form of modeling still however. Actually trimming and Booleaning and the ability to add very smooth, precise, and tangent rounds and fillets, extremely quickly, is the primary advantage of NURB's over polygons.

In Maya however, the seam tessellation algorithms are in a word - crap! My mother after taking a 2 week BASIC programming course could write a better seam tessellation algorithm then the ones that Maya uses which were written probably a year before Maya was released in 1998 and I doubt they have been looked at since! LOL

Use a package like Rhino, Solid Works and Inventor and the fillets and rounds and Booleaned seams are perfect! You do not have to sit there and diddle manually with tessellation like you do in Maya or even Alias.

Polygons are much easier to texture paint as you can paint across seams with many different packages or avoid the seams all together. You cannot avoid seams in NURB's as every surface has to be an all quad patch and so the only way to make holes for instance is to trim. I am not sure that there are any paint apps that work with nurbs models that would have tons of seams.


"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675

Last edited by ctbram; 08-03-2012 at 02:55 AM.
# 7 08-03-2012 , 01:45 PM
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There are many rules that determine if Boolean's work or not. All I can say based on the data you have provided is that you must be breaking some rule(s) or the Boolean would be working. With the info you have provided I have no way of knowing what you are doing wrong. You might want to provide some screen captures.

Attached is screen shot of what I am working on. It's the low poly character tutorial offered on this site.

The geometry is intersecting so I am not sure why it won't work.

Attached Images
# 8 09-03-2012 , 01:12 AM
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The head does not appear to be NURB's. It looks more like polygons? I cannot tell what the neck portion is. Are you trying to Boolean NURB's or Polygons? You must pick one or the other, they cannot be mixed.


"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675
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