Max Crashing during Boolean Operations

[Anonymous]

OK, after some assistance yesterday, I've been able to create my terrain and an extruded object to use as ProBoolean primitives. Attached is a screenshot showing the two objects and the MAX file for scene.

What I'm after is two fold. I need to slice the red object out of the blue object and (with a clone of both objects) gather a piece that represents the intersection of the two. Basically creating a grove and the corresponding filler piece that I can then use to show the hillside in different stages of mining operations.

Plan's all laid out.

Well, I select one of the objects (doesn't matter which) and commence to create a ProBoolean compound object. That step works, then I go to select the other piece to start the boolean operand and BOOM!. Max blows up - crashes to desktop giving me the option to save my work. Since nothing really happens, saving would be a waste of time/disk space.

I'm wondering if anyone else would have the same problem with my file. If not, I'd be curious if anyone could find fault with my model and give me guidance as to how to fix the issue.

Any help appreciated.

15376_1Mg0Av51QN6vNnDMmMeH.zip

[Anonymous]

I had the same crash happen when I tried proboolean. I even tried simplifying the terrain, converting to editable mesh/poly, selecting and detaching the polys that would be affected, they all crashed still. I don't work with booleans too often and I rarely work with terrain, so I can't shed any light on why this is happening, except maybe the complexity of the model.

I did get it to work with regular boolean, though. With a couple operations I got it seperated into the terrain and intersecting area. I only did a quick clean up of the intersection and they could both probably benefit from some more cleaning up of vertices. Hope this helps.

15382_u7RqDggo7Le9LAPmfIBn.zip

[Anonymous]

... so I can't shed any light on why this is happening, except maybe the complexity of the model. {...} Hope this helps.

Well, I cut some of the contours that I used to make the terrain from the areas where I'll not be using them and tried again. It worked. Can't really see why, because it worked just fine in a slightly different configuration yesterday.

At any rate, the forums come through again. I'm back in business.

Thanks again.

[Anonymous]

Booleans are wonky. Sometimes I get them to work by just moving one of the operands slighty. A lot of times collapsing to editable mesh is needed. Sometimes for loft objects, changing the steps in the path or shape helps... basically ways to give the boolean operation a different pattern of vertices to work w/.

[Anonymous]

Golden rule of Max, "always save before doing anything with the word boolean in it".

If a mesh steadfastly refuses to play ball, it can help to run an STL check on it (nothing related to booleans, but it shows faults in the mesh that can often cause the boolean math to die). The "old" boolean will sometimes work when ProBoolean doesn't, though you don't of course get the same features.

[CAMedeck]

Golden rule of Max, “always save before doing anything with the word boolean in it”.

I'd personally edit that to say "always save before doing anything from the Compound Objects menu.