i've been studying with Susan Kitchen's Bryce 4 book, and went through the process of building a nice fluted column with booleans that worked a treat. Then i made a neutral terrain and grouped it with a neutral cube. Then i grouped the whole column kaboodle & made that group positive. The grouped terrain + cube i made negative and flipped so that the terrain + cube would bite off the top of the column. Grouped the lot together and... nothing. i have a column with a funky rock on top. Can someone make suggestions as to how to get this to work? Many thanks in advance!

Make the neutral elements in your terrain and cube group negative - and then group and make that negative (im not certain if you even have to make this new group neg if the elements inside are). I think the key to bryce booleans is that grouped or not the root elements have to be set to their respective pos or negs.

Attached Link: http://www.best.com/~calyxa/pearl/boolean.html

grouping groups is something that you should try to avoid unless you absolutely have to. without seeing it, I'm not sure why you've got the cube with the terrain in the first place.... I've got a little boolean tip that isn't hooked up to anything else on my site (I should fix that one of these days...) - it might help you work with boolean groups more easily. I showed this one to Susan at Bryce Camp (after her book was already printed) and she thought it was pretty neat. -calyxa

3ddave44, I ran into the same problem with a log cabin and found the same solution with the door. When I grouped the walls made of logs and made a door for it, some if not most of the logs protruded through the door. When I figured out that each individual log had to be given a property, I gave up cuz there's over 100 logs and objects here in this image. Didnt' want to waste my month with windows. However, knowing this, the next attempt will be better, and I plan on naming all the logs so that I don't just have cylinder 1 through 90. LOL.

The terrain + cube is to make a nicely uneven "broken" top for the column, something deeper than the terrain alone. It's on page 329 of her newest Bryce book. i think i may have found something i didn't do quite right. i had made a top and bottom capital for the column, both of which had some boolean groups. Susan says to leave off the top capital if you want to make it a "relic," but i didn't. i'll have to try it again without the upper capital. Everybody, thank you for your advice. It's getting me closer to a solution. Calyxa, i think you have something there in your tutorial page. Many thanks, folks!

Hi nfredman , Do you have your terrain set to "Solid" in the terrain editor? Hawkfyr

Folks, i want to thank you for your assistance. Susan Kitchens example is just wrong. The column made up just fine, and so did the base. To lop off the top, i removed the capital and made the terrain and cube as she suggested, so that they were created flush with one another. Then i turned those upside down and covered the top of the column with them. Made both negative--NOT grouped together--and then ungrouped the column, and grouped all the column booleans with the two new negatives. This finally worked! Hawfyr is right, you need the terrain to be solid, too. You can see the results. Thank you, thank you!