3ds max ProBoolean issue

Sovereign

I have a model (that I exported from Rhino) that I am trying to cut down on polys. The massive polycount (1 million plus before Optimize) was due to 3000+ boxes of various shapes and sizes used as greebling on the starship's sides. The boxes are all supposed to be connected. So I tried "ProBoolean" because I saw you could select one and chain together rather than click "Boolean" five hundred times. However, the Union, Difference and Merge commands all produced the same result: the part I started with was joined somehow with the next part, and both parts promptly disappeared!

I've tried flipping normals and unifying normals. Neither works. What's going on????

biotech

Did you make all the boxes one object first?

Sovereign

How do you do that? Groups? They are in fact separate meshes right now (Object_00001, Object_00002 etc).

RedEye

Use the Attach command in the Editable Poly tools.

Sovereign

I did that, but all it created was one big object, unified out of 3000. It didn't allow me to Boolean them together (without using the manual Boolean which would take forever). The Booleans were lowering the polycount, based on estimates if I could boolean all the boxes I'd shave 60,000 polys off (6000 objects when the greebles are mirrored over, save 10 polys per boolean)

[Deleted User]

Booleanswould be more likely to increase your polycount though.

when you boolean a box onto a 1 planet surface, that 6 sided boxe will create new vertices and edges on the plane where they join makign the single polygon of the surface into 4 polygons.and the only face you loose on the box itself is the back poly wich you could have deleted easily anyway.

And that's a best case scenario, if the surface also has one or more edges crossing over where the box will be, it'll add polycount to the box as well.

You best bet is to attach all the boxes as a single greeble object and just delete all hidden faces, though in certain situation you may not want to as you may want the greebles to rmain a "solid" object.

booleans aren't very friendly on the best of days

Sovereign

All the greebles are boxes. I did a few test booleans (using the regular Boolean command) and the polycount kept going down... So the booleans essentially got rid of the hidden faces in addition to joining it together. Is there any command to delete all hidden faces from an object (i.e. after attachment that would accomplish the same thing)?