Blender to SL: Boolean cut interior faces not importing

[Thecla]

I'm back! And I'm trying to exhaust other avenues of trouble shooting before I post here to avoid the perception of being a lazy noobish spammer lol.

So this has happened before and I've not figured it out: I do a boolean cut against a flat piece (and not a plane, it has depth) and no matter what I do, I can't get the interior faces to display after upload. Scale is good, normals appear good, geometry looks good. I've recalculated normals. I've tried "hole tolerant" both checked and unchecked with no luck. Does anyone have some insight on what I'm doing wrong? I fixed the last model I had this problem with by rebuilding the affected faces one by one but there are too many this time.

FYI, my process was to create the text, scale and position it in front of the flat front piece it's cutting into, convert it to mesh, add a solidify modifier and give it depth, remesh it, then run the boolean.

Edit: added a pic of the backside of the table's front fascia.

Edited April 17, 2023 by Thecla

[ChinRey]

Have you tried a limited dissolve? I don't know for sure if this is the cause but your mesh has an extremely high number of superfluous vertices and tris and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's enough to cause render failures in SL.

Edited April 17, 2023 by ChinRey

[Thecla]

Thanks Chin. I realized after I posted that the number of ngons is off the hook. Seems like Blender for me is a game of whack a mole where I repeatedly forget important principles.

I will try that.

Interestingly, exporting it was an obj file and then reimporting it and exporting it as collida fixed it, regardless of the horrific topology.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

You can't stack a bunch of modifiers and expect a the model on the other end to be suitable for import. Apply your modifiers, switch to edit mode and clean up the result.

[Rick Nightingale]

Nine times out of ten if I've used boolean I need to add a trangulation modifier (with 'keep normals' if I've got any custom normals) at the end of the stack and turn off Blender's default export triangulation. Blender's default triangulation tends to lose custom normals and the SL importer cannot cope with holes at all; the modifier mostly works.

And as @Kyrah Abattoir said, applying the stack and then tidying up is the best way to go. Even for just a simple beveled edge* (manually or by modifier) the resulting edges need manually fixing for UV mapping purposes or you get little jaggies in the corners. Those can be surprisingly noticeable in world depending on the textures.

Edit: Can you guess what I've spent a good part of the morning doing to my latest creation?

Edited April 22, 2023 by Rick Nightingale

[Kyrah Abattoir]

I just want to add, what's really going on is that blender, and most modeling softwares tend to be far more tolerant to weird/messed up geometry than sl or other dedicated game/realtime engines.

Modeling software are designed to avoid breaking in those cases because they expect that it is an intermediate/temporary/unfinished models. What you see is what you get, so long as your geometry is made of 3 or 4 sides polygons (because 4 sided polygons convert very reliably into triangles), anything with more corners, you are taking a gamble on how it will be resolved on upload.