Do the new Booleans suck as much as I think they do?

[Steve Davy]

I haven't done much modeling in Maya for a while, and for the first time am attempting to use the new booleans that were introduced in 2023.

Well, to say that I'm not impressed would be an understatement. They seem to be an unwieldy confusing mess, about as unintuive as anything in Maya to the point that I can't even figure out how to display a final output result or complete the operation. Should it really be necessary to have to go hunting for a YouTube demo for something that should be completely, transparently obvious how to use to someone with 20+ years of 3D experience?

It seems like there is zero effort at Autodesk to standardize how tools work. Just about every new tool has a unique workflow, weird unintuitive Google esque menus with icons that offer no clue as to their function, and overwhelmingly redundant combinations of output result.

I can really see why people diss Maya's modeling tools. I think I really need to start using Houdini more...

Or is it just me? Be nice.

[Nicolas Combecave]

Nope, it is no just you...

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[matt estela]

To be fair booleans, as a rule, suck in all packages.

I remember when houdini showed off their new boolean stuff, everyone got very excited, it's still possible to break it. They decided to roll it into an auto-fracture tool for rbd, it works maybe 60% of the time? It's very easy to get it to error or hang, to the point that as far as I know everyone fell back on the same lazy voronoi fracture techniques.

There's an online library for doing booleans maintained by a guy at google, the nomad sculpt app integrated it. It's pretty good, but even that can be made to error out. Again it's more reliable to fall back on lower quality but more reliable sdf boolean methods.

Booleans. Ugh.

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[joiec...@gmail.com]

I haven't used Booleans in years, not in MAYA but in whatever other software. You always need to remodel, so I prefer to model myself.

Only thing I can't think of in order to use them is to do kind of start up model just for reference. And even then, I prefer to use just primitives.

[Steve Davy]

Yes, it's true that Booleans are by their nature kinda sucky and reliable, but there are situations where they are by far the easiest solution even if only to create a working mesh.

My comment wasn't so much about the reliability of the core function of how they work in Maya, more the horribly unintuitive implementation. That menu that lists inputs is absolutely horrible. The preview with wireframe display doesn't seem to make sense, and even deleting history doesn't seem to work and just deliver a final output mesh as you would expect. If you do get it to work, undoing causes one of your original meshes to then have a bright green shader instead of reverting to its proper state etc. etc. It just seems broken across the board. And I wasn't even pushing it to do anything difficult....

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Sent: Sunday, November 10, 2024 11:14 PM
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Subject: Re: [maya_he3d] Do the new Booleans suck as much as I think they do?

 

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[Steve Davy]

Of course I meant Booleans are sucky and UNreliable....

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From: maya...@googlegroups.com <maya...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Steve Davy <stevi...@hotmail.com>
Sent: Monday, November 11, 2024 8:52 AM
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