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Booleans Suck!

Actually, they don’t suck that bad, at least in the right hands. The problem I have when I use them is that they do weird things, and it doesn’t really seem to matter what program I’m using them in. Sometimes they work great, but other times they leave all kinds of nasty things to fix. Usually it’s duplicated and/or orphaned verts, as well as duplicated lines that need to be merged. That kind of stuff.

I had a recent project where I had to cut some slits in a disc that I was modeling, and it got real ugly using Booleans. I even tried stenciling (projecting the curves) on the surface, which helped, but I still had all kinds of things to clean up afterwards. It occurred to me after the project was done that I could have gone about it in a more simplified way if I had planned things out a little bit beforehand. The easy way would have been to cut holes in the surface by beveling a central vertex in the polygon, which is about as “old school” as you can get in poly modeling. And if I duplicated and slid some edges on that polygon, it would make it really easy to cut some slits.

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