Boolean Operation Fail

The amount of times I’ve had operation boolean failed on trying to join two objects is ridiculous. I’ve redrawn the same object multiple times same position have had it fail like 50 times for no reason. Then a random connection out of no where nothing changed. I can solve most of the fails for not intersecting or body would be invalid but when it says nothing its really hard to figure out what little picky thing it wants you to do sometimes just takes restarting the program. I have really tried to love this program but the bugs are making the work that I need to do take a lot longer then it needs to especially when there are other programs that work a lot smoother they might have the worst controls ever seen to man but hey at least I don’t have to redraw a section that takes me 40 mins to see a boolean operation fail and that 40 mins of drawing time absolutely wasted.

I mean absolutely NO disrespect, but it sounds as if there is something basic about your workflow that is causing your frustration. And I don’t mean obvious (except perhaps in hindsight). And I also don’t mean wrong — just different than those of us who don’t seem to be having as many problems. Happens to everyone at one time or another. Personally, I use boolean operations all the time and have never encountered any bugs, but there have been times where the “problem” was far from obvious.

The trick is figuring out the root cause to try to prevent future issues. Especially when the error message is unhelpful (a shortcoming shared by virtually every program ever written to some extent).

Rather than completely starting over each time, try to figure out exactly what it is that is causing Shapr3D to not understand your intent. The next time you experience a failure, try to experiment a little bit to determine what works and what doesn’t and hopefully, learn to understand the difference.

Some suggestions:

Make a “safety copy” of your current work. Then, systematically change ONE thing and try the boolean operation again. The changes can be almost anything, extrude a face, scale a body, cut a body in half, etc. If the operation now works, great. UNDO the boolean AND the change, and try it again, only smaller. Repeat until you can figure out the exact point it starts working as you intended.

If your first change never makes a difference, no problem. Just make sure you undo everything back to step one. We never want to change more than one thing at a time because it is too hard to isolate the cause. Pick a different change, and try again.

Eventually, you should find a tipping point where you can make it succeed or fail by making a small change. Even if the root cause of the failure is still not obvious, you will be in a much better position to try to figure it out.

Try changing the body colors, or turning on hidden lines and examining the intersections. Do this both before and after the tipping point if necessary. Sooner or later, you should develop a better understanding of what prevents Shapr from successfully completing the boolean operation.

This doesn’t actually take as long as it might seem, and the knowledge gained will probably save you a lot of time in the future.

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Hi @nick1222 ,

I’m sorry to hear about these issues. Can you provide a specific example?

I got in down to a certain corner it doesn’t like to be attached to but if I cant attach any objects to this specific corner wouldn’t this be considered a bug ? IDK maybe I’m stupid but in any logical way of thinking that’s considered a bug to me.

Bugs are always possible of course. Can you provide a specific example as Istvan suggested?

It is also possible that you are asking the computer to do something it can’t figure out how to do. (Stupid computer — always trying to do what I said, not what I meant :grin:)

I don’t mean to make light of your problem. Just sharing what often works for me. I’m a retired computer programmer who has always enjoyed solving puzzles of all kinds (admittedly a sickness not everyone shares). Usually when a computer program does something unexpected, it is because I didn’t clearly tell it what to do — in exactly the right way.

It gets even more complicated when using CAD or other visualization programs. Often, concepts that are obvious to a human are utterly incomprehensible to a computer. Shapr3D is easily one of the most intuitive programs I’ve ever used, but even it will occasionally get confused because it is unable to read your mind and the number of possibilities in 3D space is too large to just guess.

Normal people will do exactly as you did, and ask for help. Me … I’m a glutton for punishment and too impatient to wait, so I will immediately attempt to narrow down the possibilities and “solve the puzzle” and possibly learn something to help me in the future. Or at least get a specific, reproducible bug example so the programmers have a place to start.

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I’m exactly the same as you :slight_smile: Except I’m still a working programmer.

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