Please help problem with Maya

[Jumbomahmo]

I am trying to follow the same steps as you, however, when I do the boolean step (Mesh - Boolean - Intersection) my mesh disappears. I am using a Marvelous designer Obj as well. Nothing different from your tutorial. Do you know why this may be?
Thank you in advance for your help. I look forward to your response

The problem that I have

 

 

Video tutorial

[Jumbomahmo]

I am trying to follow the same steps as you, however, when I do the boolean step (Mesh - Boolean - Intersection) my mesh disappears. I am using a Marvelous designer Obj as well. Nothing different from your tutorial. Do you know why this may be?
Thank you in advance for your help. I look forward to your response

The problem that I have

 

 

Video tutorial

[Chosen Few]

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Jumbomahmo wrote:

Nothing different from your tutorial.

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Well, that's not true.

You actually deviated from the tutorial in many important ways.  I'll explain what the differences were, but before I do that, I'll talk more generally about why your geometry is disappearing on you when you try to do the Boolean subtraction.  When that happens, it's because you've created a situation in which the mathematics have become impossible.

Boolean operations, by definition, are nothing more than mathematical equations. To make them work, you MUST begin with proper data upon which the math can work.  In Maya terms, that means things like remembering to delete history and freeze transformations when and where you need to; making sure geometry is not inside out, non-manifold, or otherwise problematic; ensuring topologies of the surfaces involved are as compatible as possible; etc., etc., etc.

With that in mind, let's talk about where you deviated from the tutorial:

 

 

1.  You used a different method to create your cube than the author did.  He made a simple default cube, without interactive creation enabled.  You, on the other hand, did use interactive creation.  That in itself isn't necessarily problematic, but it did cause you to make your first mistake.  Notice the author's cube was perfectly uniform, and close in size to the source model, while yours was oblong, and was MUCH larger than the source model, as well as quite a bit taller.  Because of this, your divisions did not coincide nearly as well with the topology of the source model as the author's did.  With the cube being that large, you should have given it a lot more divisions, especially along that long width.  (This was not what directly caused the Boolean to fail, but it would have caused you other problems, if the Boolean had worked.)

The whole point of this step of the tutorial was to create quads that were of similar size to the source model's tris, so that the upcoming Boolean intersection of the two would be as neat and clean as possible.  You seem to have missed that point entirely.

 

2.  You extruded in the opposite direction than the author did.  Your model was therefore inside out, relative to the author's model.  This is most likely the first factor that caused the Boolean to fail.  (To ensure that models are not inside out, always work with backface culling enabled, so you can see these kinds of mistakes as they happen.)

 

3.  You deleted the original faces after extrusion, whereas the author deleted the newly created faces.  This isn't necessarily a problem, but it is nonetheless a deviation from the tutorial.  I only mention it, since you said nothing was different.  There are scenarios in which even a subtle difference like this can have huge consequences, so it's worth paying attention to.

 

4.  Most importantly of all, you did not delete history or freeze transformations before performing the Boolean operation.  This is crucially important.  Maya mathematically tracks every single change you make to every single object in your scene, and records it to the construction history for each object.  This is an extremely powerful function of Maya, which enables you to do all kinds of things procedurally that you would never otherwise be able to do, but it comes with the downside that every time you perform a new operation, all that math has to be recalculated.  When you do things that drastically change an object's topology, such as Booleans, you should delete the object's construction history first, to ensure you don't create conflicts between the existing math and the new math you're about to perform. 

You should also freeze transformations, so that the object's size and rotation do not end up as extraneous factors in the new equations, which could affect the results.  When you freeze the transformations, size values become ones, and rotation values become zeroes, which makes them all effectively neutral in equations.

Neglecting to delete history and freeze transformations is the most common cause of operational failures or unexpected results.  Always keep history and transformation values only for as long as you need them, no longer.  Remember to delete history and freeze transformations at all key points in your work flow, and you'll eliminated 90% of potential problems before they happen.

 

To summarize, issues 2 and 4 are the things that directly contributed to the Boolean failure.  Issue 1 likely had nothing to do with the failure, but would have led to undesirable results had the failure not happened.  Issue 3 probably did not directly cause any problems, but was still an area where you did something different from what was in the tutorial.

 

 

By the way, I'm not sure who the "you" was that you thought you were talking to when you said, "follow the same steps as you," and "your tutorial".  If you wanted to speak directly to the author of the tutorial, his contact info is probably on his website.  This is a public forum, with thousands of individual users.  99.9999% of the people who might respond here are not that author.  I'm not him, but I responded anyway.

[Jumbomahmo]

Thanks for the help on that
But do you
 Can put pictures or video explanation

[Chosen Few]

I'm afraid I can't think of any way to explain those points with pictures.  You're going to need to read the words.

If Englsh is not your first language, perhaps it would be a good idea for you to state what language you do speak, and maybe someone would be kind enough to translate.

[Aquila Kytori]

Hi Jumbo

Some pictures ...........

Chosen explained that :

The above is not the cause of your mesh disappearing  but will effect the quality of the mesh that you are trying to create.

 

 

3: is not so important at the moment

 

4: VERY IMPORTANT

        Delete History and  Freeze Transformations before performing the Boolean operation.

 The reason for doing this is to keep the math's as simple as possible when Maya is doing the Boolean Calculations.