Solids or Faces

[Sketchrender]

Hello

I am from a formz background, and I am in the process of moving to 3D studio max.

 

I have always modeled in Solids, and differenced (or Booleaned as it is called in max) everthing, and have found this to be very convenient and a good clean modeling procatice.

 

Now that I am moving to Max, I have been advise to steer away from booleans completely and learn how to model with faces and cut holes as i need them.

 

I have found that if i ever wanted to bring the models in to any other programme or have to give it out to consultants for Enviromental Impact studies in the past that faces are not always the best option as they some times become corrupt or lost as not everybody uses the same software these days.

 

 

So what should i do ?, learn how to model a different way ie faces or keep up the booleans in max, is there a problem with booleans and very large models.

 

Advise would be very much apprecited.

 

Thank you

 

phil

[Hector]

Hello:

 

Modelling surfaces doesn't mean that you can't use the booleans, at least in lightwave, I don't now about MAX. They seem to work well most of the time. Problems may arise when you are playing with very complex shapes.

 

What I've seen about modeling with surfaces is that many times you fake the geometry of what you are modeling because you know the renderer will smooth the surface, helping to keep polygons down. That works perfectly well for visualization, because the ouput will allways be an image or an animation.

 

However, if you want to use your models for other tasks then that fake geometry doesn't work very well. I've been trying lately to use lightwave to design things. Few weeks ago I successfully exported a lightwave model to rapid prototyping (with some workarounds), but I had to model very carefully to keep every polygon in place,avoid holes etc. At the end, the model that came out from the rapid prototyping looked very good, but if you look close you can se the facets caused by the poligons in the curved surfaces. You can always have more polygons to avoid that problem but then you have to be even more carefull if you need to make changes to the geometry.

 

I guess that a solid modeller -even tough you can use the models for visualization.- is more appropriate for this kind of task. I guess taht's why industrial designers use solid modelers.

 

There is also software that can handle both solid and surface modeling. But I don't realy know how it works.