Boolean Union of Panel solids (paneling tools)

Hello everyone!

I wanted to use paneling tools to create a relief motif for the surface of a sculpture that is going to be 3d printed.

I Isolated the specific surface, divided it using paneling tools and created the panels with no problem.

the problem starts after baking the panels, when I want to unite them into a single closed polysurface with boolean union. it just won't work...

things I've tried so far:

1) increasing the unit tolerance (to ridiculous levels): it helped but only a little, just some of the panels would unite. (also, I recreated the morph target after changing the tolerances and recomputed in gh in case that might make a difference)

2)merge all faces for each of the panels solids (btw all the panels are legit closed polysurfaces, no problem there...

I don't know if there is something that has to do with paneling tools or the boolean operation in Rhino... 

any suggestions?