Brent Forrest offers a look into working with booleans in Maya with some great tips, some of which may surprise you. Using booleans has long been a contested process in many 3D applications, including Maya.
get to the point about working with Booleans in Maya
Until recently, Maya’s boolean operations were sadly left behind to the point where I’m sure people have long forgotten their existence. Luckily, the more recent versions of Maya added the Carve library which is a fast and reliable constructive solid geometry library, Making the Boolean operations in Maya work much, much better.
Brent shows how you can easily keep the Maya boolean operations “live” for animation, by simply adding a control node above the boolean. One of the most frustrating things with using a Maya Boolean, is that at times, the object simply disappears if the boolean appears to be too complex.
Some people have their own workflow for getting Maya Booleans to work reliably, referring back to the post Solving the “Disappearing” Boolean Problem in Maya.
Brent however shows that when the Maya Boolean object disappears, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the operation has failed. Rather, the object just needs a new shading group applied.
The one last thing that Brent shows concerning Maya booleans, is how to create what he calls a “poor man’s” metaball effect, where you can have the animated boolean objects appear to attract due to surface tension. – great stuff, Thanks Brent!
