Boolean problem on NURBS and polygons

[Anonymous]

Hallo,

I'm kind of new to maya. I'm actually a biologist and am now learning by myself, so sorry if it is a really stupid question.

Now to my problem. I have surfaces from CT dara. But the CT Data surfaces are really broken and I can't work with them. So we thought we remodel some of those surfaces. My surfaces are like pipes that branch into other pipes (I'll just attache a screenshot). So I made curves through each pipe and extruded the NURBs. Afterwards I wanted to join the NURBs with a boolean. Bu it just doesn't do anything. So i thought I'd try with polygons but the combined polygon just vanishes after the boolean. I could really use some help.

[dave.rose]

Hi! If it was my project, I would approach this differently depending on what I needed to do with the final modelt. Do you want to render them? do you want to animate them in a real-time engine, do you want a really basic representation or do you want them to look the same as your scans? Can you share some more information?

[Anonymous]

The tubes are actually feeding tubes inside a fly head. The aim is to let fluid run through them inside the gut. So I will animate in Maya and Render a video out of it at the end.  The focus of the model lays on branching point and thickness of the tubes. I'm happy for any solutions. Normally I don't have to model at all in maya since I get finished object from the CT data.

[dave.rose]

feeding tubes! awesome. Obviously I don't know your skill level with maya so I apologise if I am stating the obvious....

Not sure why your polygon extrusions wont Boolean together, I notice you are using quite an old version of Maya though and the Boolean tool wasn't as good as it is now. You could try scaling down the ends of the tubes so the edges are definitely INSIDE the tube you are trying to attach to. If there are odd intersections the old Boolean tool either gave up and did nothing or just seem to delete all the geometry. That said, even if the Boolean started working, you would still get some nasty intersections in your geometry that you would need to manually clean up by hand.

Personally I think I would start with a cube and extrude the faces so I had a really low poly version of the final result. You could then tweak the result and make sure your topology is nice and clean. From here you could subdivide the model to get smooth tubes and apply further tweaks with the sculpt tool to get a more organic shape.

I don't know much about fluid simulations but I am guessing the cleaner the topology the less chance of getting errors in the simulation.

Hope some of that is useful!

[Anonymous]

I'm really not that skilled in Maya since I've self taught myself in the last few months. I fixed some of the problems with the Boolean. Part of the problem seemed to be that I pulled the curves in different directions. I have to agree with youthe geometry afterwards really isn't all that good. But it still doesn't work all the time. Quite often when I do the boolean union the first selected object just vanished. But I really like your suggestion with the cube. It should get really symmetrical like this. I will try this. I'm really, really thankful for your help. I've spent weeks already on those stupid tubes.