From the course: 3ds Max 2019 Essential Training

Preparing Boolean operands - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2019 Essential Training

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Preparing Boolean operands

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- [Narrator] To begin the chapter on polygon modeling we'll start with booleans which is a technique for combining objects. Either subtracting, or adding, or finding the intersection among various volumes. And we'll use that to create holes for doors in our office walls here. I'm going to start from this wall over here and, in my scene, it's labeled rectangle 001, select that. And go in close in the top view, right-click in the top view and press the Z key to zoom in. And what we have here is swinging doors for two different rooms. And we need to cut holes for those doors. And we'll use boxes to do that. I'll maximize the top view with Alt + W and get in a little bit closer with the wheel. And notice that it's difficult to work, sometimes, in 3ds Max, because you need some objects to be in wire frame and other objects to have texturing and shading. And we don't have the ability in 3ds Max to set a flag per object as to whether it will be shaded or not. If I press the F3 key to toggle between wire frame and shaded modes I can see that I can never actually see the lines that indicate where the wall is. And so I can't tell where I need to cut. And there's a little trick for this, what you can do is, select your object, and go into the object properties, right-click, choose object properties, and in here, we can enable see-through for the object. And in my case, I am not inheriting the properties of the enclosing layer. If you see this is all grayed-out and it says by layer here then you can click that by layer button and then get to these options for the current object. OK, so I'll click OK, and with see-through enabled, now it's displayed in gray, and I can just barely see where the line on my image plane is. And that's where I want to create the box. Alright, so I'll go into the create panel to box. And I want to snap in 3D to the existing grid points. Getting close, there. Click and drag, holding down the left mouse button. And then simultaneously hold down the middle mouse button and drag. And keep doing that, just release the middle mouse, and then drag, and then click the middle mouse again but holding down the left mouse button the entire time. And then when we get over here to the other side release the mouse, and drag, and you'll see, in the create panel, that the height is changing. It doesn't matter what the height is just now we can just click to complete the operation and that box has been built. And then right-click to exit creation mode. Go back to the perspective view with Alt + W. And then zoom in with Z. And there's our box. And we need it to be a lot taller. I want the door to be 200 centimeters in height that's about six and a half feet. And with that object selected, the box, go into the modify panel. And I can set the height to 200 centimeters. And the width here doesn't really matter because that's the thickness of the hole so I can increase that but as long as it is thicker than the object we're trying to cut then everything is fine. But there is one little issue here at the bottom. We will have a coincident situation here where the polygon of the cutting box is right on top of the polygon for the object we want to cut which is the wall. And so we can see that a little bit better, I'll turn on edged faces with F4. We've got a polygon right here that's exactly on the X Y plane of the world. And this box is also sitting exactly on the X Y plane. And we want to move the box down just a little bit so that we don't get some garbage polygon here on the threshold. So that just needs to come down a little bit, again, it doesn't matter how much, some amount. I'll move it down by 10 centimeters with the move tool. Just type in -10 for the Z axis. I'll need to compensate the height for that movement because now the hole that we're going to cut is only going to be 190 centimeters. So let's increase the height to 210 here. And now that box is the correct height and the correct length, which is, the width of the door here. And the thickness is thick enough to cut the hole. Alright so that's how we prepare a boolean operand. We need another one here for the other door. We can just duplicate the existing one in the top view. Go over to that top view, and right click, and maximize with Alt + W. And then with snaps enabled, hold down Shift, and drag. And we made a copy, but we can make an instance, it doesn't matter which, here. And then finally just position that where it needs to be precisely, zooming in to check it. Looks like it needs to go up by one centimeter here. So I'll do that. Alright so we've got that positioned where we need it. I can go back to the perspective view, Alt + W, and for the wall, we can disable its see-through property, select the wall, right click, go to object properties, and disable see-through, and now we've prepared a couple of operands for a boolean subtraction cutting holes in the wall.

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