Max Underground: 3DS Max subscription members to get Booleans that always work

(Updated January 12, 2006) Or almost always, that is. Current users of Power Booleans have reported that even though they work much better than Max's existing implementation, the software still has certain issues. In any case better Booleans are much needed and will no doubt be a welcome addition. According to an email from Autodesk, the "Pro Booleans" extension is expected to be available in the course of this month.
Quoting Power Boolean's website: "How much time and effort could you save with Booleans that always work and produce quality meshes?". A lot of time. The new extension for subscription members is based on NPower Software's Power Booleans and will include a Power Cutter tool for breaking apart or sectioning 3D objects. The new extension is expected to be available in northern hemisphere's Winter 2006.

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Posted Mon Jan 9, 200606:51 PST by Pablo Hadis | Source:

Comments:

"Max subscription members to get Booleans that always work"

The non-subscribers can eat cake?

Posted by: at January 9, 2006 10:09 AM

it pays to be on subscription, else just wait for Max 9

Posted by: user420 at January 9, 2006 10:56 AM

i suppose its no surprise that AME is going to take an outside solution. theres really no sense in reinventing the wheel and irking developers. if you take from the community, you arent puching anyone out of the way.

Posted by: Jeff at January 9, 2006 09:19 PM

However, brep (npower technologies) is not fully supported by some thrid party renderers such as ART's PURE/Renderdrive and Splutterfish's Brazil so beware....!

Hopefully, this extension will force the developers to resolve these issues in the future...!

Posted by: Mike at January 10, 2006 09:16 AM

And another brick is added to the straw house. . .

Posted by: Craig at January 10, 2006 11:32 AM

Mike,

Just to note - Power Booleans is tri/quad mesh stuff only, no BREPs are involved.

Also, BREPs are supported fully by Brazil r/s - as they are simply meshed when getRenderMesh() is called. The only current issue, which will be fixed in a version to be released as soon as we can get away from b2 development a bit longer, is with non-derived normals. This tends to show itself mostly with Power Nurbs/Solids/Translators, as these may get their data from CAD applications that use explicit normals, rather than derived normals.

Hope this clarifies things a bit :)

Posted by: Richard Annema at January 11, 2006 09:57 PM