Hello.

I have C8.1 pro. and need to do some cutting in a body shell of a vehicle.

I would like to add some doors that I can open to this body shell, but to do so will have to cut out the doors shape from the body itself to start off.

All I need to know is if this can be done with C8 ?

Like how do I go about selecting the area I want to subdivide and how do I then draw my door to that selected area so that I can then delete the not wanted faces etc.so I am left with a hole the shape of a door.....lol

Just cutting the hole is all I need some advice with please.

THanks for any help.

Cheers

You can use booloeans (I dont like this idea), or model the door and add to the car. The right thing is to draw a sketch before start to model, so you can preview all lines that you will need. Here an example how to create holes without using boolean:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mL-KziXsOlM

GKDantes is correct in that booleans are not very much of a preferred modeling technique.

I am assuming that the car body you're working with is a vertex object.

There are a few different ways that you can proceed to use booleans to give you results that are acceptable but usually they result in additional work in the final model to get it to look good that's tricky or a ton of work.

In short, build a model of the shape of the door that you want, overlap that shape onto the car body and perform a boolean subtract.

If you find that booleans are the path that you want to go, you can reply here and I'll post a few weird tips on it.

If you are starting out with a mesh and delete vertices, the UV map may be messed up. You can always recreate a new UV map.

-or-

You can select the doors and make them a new shading zone and make them transparent. Then add new visible doors in the same location...

Thankyou very much to Sueposer

*                                 Kixum*

*                                 GK Dantas.*

for your most valued advice and help I will be trying my luck over the weekend and will let you know what happens fingers crossed LOL.

*Cheers Blueblott

Post results here.

Well I have been trying out the  "Boolean" manouvre in my quest to make a hole in the car side..........Yep...   am now ready for some of your Magical weird tips.lol

But what I found ( and everybody knows this already I suppose ) is that booleans seem to work fine with Primitives....drop a cube through a plane perfect square....a cylinder through a sphere  leaves neat hole. Even create text drop through a cube same nice cut or engrave

 The only exception I found was trying to cut through the side of a cylinder with text.....this it didnot like..it performed the cut but it left several artifacs along the way.as you can see above.

How do you clean up this ?

and make your uv maps fresh over.

Cheers Blueblott

That is the problem with boolean, you always get a mess in the end. You will need to delete some polygons and fill others roles. Sometimes weld some vertices help a lot too.

The first sad and unfortunate thing you should know is that your UV mapping of your model is destroyed when you do this.  Carrara basically resets the whole texturing thingamadeal with a model when you do a boolean because C considers the new booleaned object a whole new animal.  Therefore, all texturing is blown away and you have to start over.  UV mapping is what you do LAST.

Now for this particular deal, I did several things to get it to work.  I'll summarize them in the following steps.

1.)  I created my text as a standard text object.

2.)  I converted the text into a vertex object.  You do this by opening up your text object in the modeling room, edit menu, convert to other modeler, select vertex and jack up the fidelity to max.

3.)  I inserted a primitive cylinder, went into the modeling room and did a convert to vertex model again (although no options when converting a primitive).  Now just for knowledge sake, opening up a blank vertex object and inserting a cylinder vertex primitive there is also just as good as this and a tweeny easier and I think you can generate better cylinders.  For those of you who are spline freaks (like me), you can create a cylinder in the spline modeler, set the surface fidelity up to a big number and convert it to vertex also.  The point is (sheesh!) that we're trying to get a cylinder that's a vertex object (dang we made it!).

4.)  I selected the cylinder mesh (ctrl a) and subdivided it.  I did this to try to get the cylinder mesh to have the same "density" of poly's as the text object.

Then I did a 3D boolean subtract and guess what, I had a small amount of goofed up poly's (dang!).

5.)  To fix this, I opened up the text object, did a ctrl a to select the whole beast, and subdivided it.

Then I did the boolean subtract again and poof, I got what you see here.

The main things of this little discussion to realize is that if you're going to do the boolean thing, you want to have the mesh density of all your objects to be about the same density and I find that I have more luck if all my objects are vertex objects to start with.

Sometimes, I just subdivide the areas where the boolean is going to occur (I don't subdivide the whole model).

Anyway, those are my general rules that I use for booleans.  There are a few other tricks and traps that are useful (tutorial time I should think).

Hope this helps,

HEY Kix

Thanks for the info, great job that will give me a starting point, I appreciate your help.

Cheers

*Blueblott