Surfaces Vs Meshes - Booleans

My question: Are Booleans using Surfaces more robust than Booleans using meshes.

I have been using GH to create a parametric model that can have certain features adjusted with sliders. I have been working with meshes as some parts have been brought in from 3D scans. Any new features I have been creating as surfaces, converting to a mesh and then using Booleans to add or subtract to the model.

I am having some problems when using the mesh Booleans. I can get them to work but they don't seem very robust and are prone to failure when changing the size of the features with a slider. I understand the process of the Boolean (intersect, split, join delete) but was wondering if there was any differences in the process for Rhino when using surfaces or meshes. (i.e, if I were to remodel my 3D scans as surfaces, create all new features as surfaces and then Boolean, would I get better results?)

My other option seems to be generating the points of the new features in Python and then creating the new meshes from scratch, but this requires a lot of learning on my part. Any guidance you can give me would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Rob.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Aaron M. Ryan on December 25, 2013 at 10:08pm

Rob,

Way to move around the absence of response in this thread and triumph! Happy Holidays, my friend!

Aaron

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on December 26, 2013 at 2:25am

Rhino Mesh Booleans do seem pretty fragile. Some work was done on them a couple of years back and they definitely got better, but they still have a long way to go. I don't know if it's worth your effort to convert meshes to Nurbs, it all depends on how difficult that would be. If it's a lot of work, my advice would be to use a different program to perform the boolean operations, even though I don't know which one to recommend. If the nurbification is a fairly trivial step, then by all means.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Permalink Reply by Robert Moore on December 27, 2013 at 8:59am

Trawling the forums on boxing day guys. No rest for the wicked eh. Merry Xmas!

Through trial and error I came to the conclusion that surfaces seem more reliable than mesh booleans. I was able to recreate the original mesh as surfaces without too much trouble within GH. I projected a grid of points onto the mesh and then built the surface from points.

Thank you for your replies,

Rob.

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