Booleon with groups?

[scostumatu]

Hi all

 

One thing that is giving me troubles is booleans/pro booleans with groups.

Ill give you the scenario....

 

I have an internal scene where i want to place the downlights on the ceiling. The downlights are grouped with several objects (ie glass, outer rim, inner rim etc etc). What I want to do is cutout the light shape (and depth of course) into the ceiling. I just cant get it to work with groups. THe workaround for me is to use a cylinder of the same radius as the downlights and use that as a placeholder and cutout the holes that way.

 

Hoping this makes sense.

 

Any help would be appreciated.

 

Thanks

S

[Andres del Castillo]

Hi John. As a suggestion, make auxiliar cylinders, after that all te cylinders in edit poly and attach them together. Once you have done, use boolean. It is not recomended to use boolean, but it will be worse if you use downlinghts models as an operand. Good luck.

[Scott Schroeder]

Or you just don't boolean out your lights. If you look at most typical recessed lights, the trim hangs down past the ceiling by little bit. The lens typically rests somewhere near the trim. Simply create your recessed lights to sit ON the ceiling surface. This avoids any and all boolean issues that may arise. Even if it isn't 100% accurate, you will never see it in the render once everything is all illuminated and so on.

 

If you really really need to cut out holes, such as if you have to use deep recessed lights, do not boolean them. It's far easier to create your ceiling as a live spline. Then, draw an octagon outline near the size of your recessed light and attach the octagons (you don't need to use cylinders) to your ceiling spline. This is similar to booleans, but provides you with a much cleaner and easier to work with result.

 

Booleans should be use somewhere in the range of never. There are better work arounds than boolean operations.

[Andres del Castillo]

I agree with you, Scott, both solutions are better.

[Nic H]

yep never use booleans in max

they are messy and sluggish

[erkutacar]

i like making subdivisions to place the spots and extrude them inwards.. gives u move flexibility and doesnt mess up ur geometry..

[BrianKitts]

yep never use booleans in max

they are messy and sluggish

 

and don't use groups they are lazy organization systems that make it hard to work in the scene when groups are nested and they don't function well with layers.

 

Learn to model properly (only boolean when necessary...hint it normally isn't) and organize your scene well using proper naming conventions, attaching objects, and proper layering for organization

[Nic H]

yes my pet hate is groups....so very slow - nested groups are the worst.

 

 

+1 attach everything together as well - not individual meshes for every single element joined by a group thingy.