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Advancing Boolean Workflows for Media and Entertainment Projects

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Description

Booleans are a foundational part of content creation, yet it was frowned upon to use traditional polygon booleans in media and entertainment projects. To solve this problem, Autodesk rebuilt their booleans from the ground up within 3ds Max software, creating a new, powerful, and trusted solution in the Boolean Modifier that unlocks exciting new workflows and capabilities. In this session, you'll learn about how and why this new system was created for 3ds Max, which benefits it provides, and how you can use it to its maximum potential in your own work to create amazing content for film and TV, games, XR, or 3D printing projects.

Key Learnings

  • Learn how to adopt newly created boolean workflows in your own film, game, XR, or 3D-printing productions.
  • Learn how the Boolean Modifier works within the 3ds Max modifier stack to empower your own content-creation practices.
  • Learn how design, product management, and engineering collaborated in Autodesk to implement a new customer-facing feature.

Speakers

  • Avatar for Logan Foster
    Logan Foster
    As one of the product owners here at Autodesk I get to work with the 3DS Max and Maya teams to provide amazing modeling and animation tools to our users. I have been a user of 3DS Max for over 20 years and have a wide range of experience developing content for a multitude of platforms (though my primary focus for much of my career has been on real time graphics).
  • Michael Spaw
    Michael Spaw Senior designer for the Modeling capabilities team, EMS Bringing over two and half decades of Max experience in feature films, games and design visualization, Michael joined the Max team as a product owner and designer in 2015. With a background in industrial design, he entertains a variety of interests, ranging from procedural graphics, Making, and cooking. His day job keeps him busy designing new software tools as well as next generation workflows.
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Transcript

LOGAN FOSTER: Hi everybody, and welcome to this Autodesk 2024 class on advancing Boolean workflows for media and entertainment projects. Before we go any further, we always have to do a safe harbor statement here with Autodesk. Really, this is just telling you might see stuff in this presentation. It may or may not reflect the nature of the software or how it is. It could be some future looking things or items.

Please never make any purchasing decisions based on what you might see within this presentation, but we do hope you have a great time participating and watching it. So for those of you that don't know, my name is Logan Foster. I'm one of the product owners here at Autodesk. I've been here for about five years. And I predominantly work with the modeling team to produce a bunch of really cool modeling features and capabilities for 3ds Max and now for Maya.

MICHAEL SPAW: And I'm Michael Spaw, I'm senior designer on the modeling capabilities team. And I've been part of the EMS group for nine years. My background is in production, feature film games, visualization, and have been working doing modeling and procedural workflows for that entire time.

LOGAN FOSTER: So getting into the presentation itself, there's some quick learning objectives. We just wanted to highlight on the screen here. First and foremost, really, we talk a lot about the Boolean modifier that we've introduced to 3ds Max 2024, how to use it, what are some of the workflows, why it's really a game changer for a lot of artists and users of the software.

But also, we're going to be talking a little bit about how design, product management, engineering actually goes forth and goes and implements a brand new solution to a problem that we've been facing within the software. So let's dive right into it.

Let's start talking about the legacy Booleans and what drove us to update them. So when it comes to Booleans, especially the legacy Booleans that were inside of 3ds Max, what were your thoughts as a user as an artist? How much of it was positive and how much of it was actually negative feeling?

Chances are it was negative feeling. There were a lot of problems that we knew about from users, looking at stuff, seeing that there's issues. I think this screen kind of summarizes a lot of the key points or the key words that maybe people would bring up when they think about Booleans and Boolean workflows and just the general frustration that they had.

But more importantly, working with Booleans broke the hearts of artists like myself. Like yourself. Either because we couldn't use Booleans or because we didn't want to use Booleans, or we're being asked to use them. So either way, not so great. Not so fun. So clearly there's a problem with Booleans.

And hey, problem solved. Just update the Booleans, right? Well, unfortunately, it's not as easy as that. And there's a bit of a journey and a bit of a process that we went through. And we're going to share that with you here today. And we hope you enjoy it. And as we go through it, hopefully you'll learn a little bit more about the Boolean modifier itself and how to work with it.

So really, like we said, the reality was we need more than a good idea. Good ideas are great, but we need to really have some evidence and some factual information and real motivation for it. And so when I look at things as a product manager and the product management side of things here at Autodesk, I like to start with the idea, start with why. And this is an idea that was inspired to me by a really good Ted Talk by Simon Sinek. He's also got a really good book on the topic if you ever want to check it out.

But the general idea is why and not what, as the center of all of our decisions. And this is kind of hard because it's a bit of a table flip when you think about it. But why is the purpose. It's the cause. It's the belief that guides us. It's the motivator that drives the how and then what for what we will do. So this is our why statement.

We want to return trust to Booleans by focusing on quality, data retention and enabling artists to create a robust set of shapes and forms in a minimal amount of time. It's pretty simple. It's to the point. And as you can tell, it was a really good pillar that kind of helped push us and motivate us into finding our how, what was going wrong, and then eventually coming up with our what, we will do to solve this problem.

So to do this and figure out the how and then what, we really had to start gathering information. And we started internally with some of the data that we got here. We've got two legacy systems within 3ds Max that were there. The Boolean and the Pro Boolean system. They did some things well, they did some things poorly. And we could tell they did things poorly because we also had a lot of bugs related to what was going on there. Really imperfect, a lot of issues, a lot of problems that was causing frustrations and issues and concerns with customers.

But another thing that we've got within 3ds Max, is we capture a lot of really good analytics data. This is all very anonymous, so no one has to worry about any personal information being carried in here. But the important thing that we gather out of this, or what we can kind of gather out of this, is that, yes, the Booleans, the legacy Booleans were being used, maybe not as much as they should have been. People were using them. OK we can see that by the monthly events usage.

But a big problem that we can see right here from this data is that there's almost like a 50/50 split between users using Booleans and Pro Booleans. And that causes a lot of confusion because while they're similar, they're not quite exactly the same and they have their own unique sets of problems and issues with it.

But more importantly, I like to go with this logic of analytics. Tell you what you want to know, not what you need to know. And for us to actually find out what we need to know, we need to start to design.

MICHAEL SPAW: So this kind of captures the spirit of reaching out and talking to the customers and finding out, OK, so what really is the issue? Because as Logan presented, we know some numbers, but we got to get into the nitty gritty of it and really understand things a lot better. And part of that is reaching out to the customers and talking to them directly.

So for instance, you talk to a customer and you find out some of the things that maybe you know, but you get to hear some specifics. And that's always good. And this case is like, OK, well, Booleans have some issues after the fact. We got to do a lot of cleanup because sometimes we get really bad geometry that's coming out of it. Or this next quote.

OK, well, they might do what I need them to do, but man, they're kind of difficult to work with. Their interactivity or being able to really see what's going on in the viewport isn't always possible. So they're just two items out of a litany of feedback that we got. And that's really important to hear those kind of specifics.

In addition, one of the great places that we can gather information is the Max ideas page. And this provides users an opportunity to reach out to us and to the rest of the community, posting an idea on something that they want to see that doesn't exist in the software or say, a product improvement. And the great thing is that they can put their own two cents on it. And then people can look at that and potentially add their own comments to it or vote it up as, hey yeah, this is really a serious issue. We'd like you to do something about it.

And so we use this mechanism to a great extent to help drive our decisions. And then when we do get into development, we certainly use this feedback to help look at it and go, OK, well there's some great ideas in here. Are those things actionable? Can we riff on them and figure out even better tact for how to solve the problem?

So we've got all these ideas. And there's a little bit of magic, hand-wavy kind of business that says, OK, well, this is our design. And one slide doesn't really sum that up very well because it can be a protracted process, especially for something as complicated that has as much UI as what we were wanting to do with the Booleans.

And a good case in point is one of the key things that our customers wanted was to take this from the notion of a compound object, which we've had a couple of and that workflow, to bringing it into the modifier stack. And so working through that and all the other suggestions that were made, we basically have to come up with a paper prototype of, we think it's going to be like this. And so that sounds hand-wavy. But it's quite a bit of work to get to that point.

So at the end of the day, we've got our proposal. And we've got to make a pitch. And that allows us to take this to people on the product side and look at the scheduling and figure out, OK, do we have the resources? Does this fit in to where we want to do this development right now? Do we want to reconsider? Do we know enough? Is it actually actionable? And once we have that, hopefully we get the two thumbs up and we have an approval.

LOGAN FOSTER: And luckily for us, this case, we did. Leadership loved it, loved what we did, love what we had, all the data we collected. It seemed like a no brainer to them to really approve it and have us go forth on this process. So moving on from there, we got up into something called the Agile process. And this is one of those wonderful words that if you deal with any kind of software development or engineering, everyone says yeah, we all do Agile.

Well yeah, we do too, here at Autodesk. And it's a lot of fun, actually. It sounds scary, but really it's around this idea of a core loop where you have a plan, you have an idea of what you want to work with. You set yourself a little bit of a time goal. In our case, we call it a sprint and it's a two week period of time. We go, we make it, and then at the end of the sprint we test it out. We test it internally. Our QA are testing it.

And then Mike's testing it. I'm playing with it. We're all trying to use it to do stuff, but more importantly, we're also pushing it out to beta and having beta test it out. So this really became a pivotal way to work. Because it didn't just give us the ability to build things and get it out the door, but it let us pivot and let us react and let us like be reactionary to feedback that our beta users gave us with the workflow that we had. And we're going to show and talk a little bit about it in these next few slides here.

MICHAEL SPAW: So once we have the design and the approval, we really have to go into production. And that can take a little while. So all the ideas are presented over to the developers and we begin to rough in what is all the various functionality. And so the very first builds that went into beta, something that was testable, just to get first impressions were happening January 2022. And this was going to be about the Max 2023 timeline.

And we're nowhere close at this point to feature complete. There's a lot of rough edges. But really, the goal is just to get it out to beta and get some good feedback, some initial impressions. So things that we wanted to really validate was the overall workflow. Because now we had a Boolean modifier versus an object. How does this work in combination with things in the modifier stack? And this was really pivotal because this is where the users said that they wanted to work.

And we also had to bring over aspects of the previous UI because that was working really well. But there are also lots of new considerations because there was a modifier and other things that we wanted to do. For instance, we wanted to make sure that we had really good exposure to the operands that go up or go together to make a Boolean operation. And what was that going to look like? And how was it going to feel while somebody was operating in the viewport?

Good piece of information at this point. One of the things that was really pivotal to the users is they wanted the immediacy of, hey, I've put these multiple objects together in some combination. I want to drill down to the various operands, and I want to be able to change them because they're sitting in the modifier stack.

I can kind of play with variations. And so at this point, we were referencing in all these objects that then became objects that we're going to subtract or add into the final result. And so that was a brand new opportunity for us and we definitely wanted to get a lot of good feedback on that.

So there's a lot of iteration. And one of the great things about having software in beta is, sure, we're still in development. But because our users use these tools, Boolean especially, in a lot of different contexts, it's more than just a modeling tool. And sometimes they come up with really clever use cases. And we want to facilitate that. If it makes sense and enough people can benefit from it, we like to take those things into consideration. And then it may even modify the design.

So for instance, we had a request that, OK, well, when you're Booleaning two objects together, there is an edge that's created that's an intersection. I'd love to be able to extract that out and do something with it, some secondary operation. And we hadn't been able to do that before. That was a feature that felt important at the time that we wanted to investigate. And eventually, it got included.

Or we knew, for instance, that we really wanted to be able to grab these operands directly in the viewport and manipulate them without having to go over to the command panel and dig through and get at them that way. And that offered a real sense of immediacy and interactivity that we knew was one of our goals.

We also wanted to be able to do things like change what was the operator, the Boolean operation type? And we wanted to be able to do that directly in the viewport where the artist was focusing their time. So we added both manipulators for in viewport controls, as well as being able to change the operation type. So all of those kind of innovations, they take iterations. We want to build the software to do it and then we want to get it out to beta. And we want to find out what people think and we wash, and repeat.

So going through this, you learn a lot of things. You have some preconceived notions of what's important and what you need to do. But you also learn a lot along the way. And that's part of the reason that the beta process and the testing is so critical. We need to get that kind of feedback to really make sure that we're hitting all the marks.

One of the things that we realized during the development of this is, it's not only what you see and the user interacts with that's the important part. Booleans are really challenging in a polygonal environment. There's just a lot of edge cases and complexity. And one of the things that we knew was the case from our initial feedback and motivated this effort to begin with is, hey, Booleans need to be reliable.

Like, if it creates a bad piece of geometry and then that causes problems further down the line, it's really not serving me. Especially if I have to do some cleanup and problem solving and second guessing as to why something may not have given me the result that I was expecting. So we did a lot of work on the underlying engine that drives Booleans, including work that happens kind of precursor to that, making sure that all the geometry is amenable to those operations.

And then once the Boolean operation has taken place, making sure that the result is also clean so that somebody can wash, and repeat, or guarantee that they can do that kind of operation multiple times or take it into other contexts so that they have a really good model to work with.

Other things that we figured out along the way was there's the possibility for new operations. Things like doing a split between the various pieces. Or that, OK, well, we want to do that. But what's really involved? Because dealing with coplanarity of faces and Boolean operations is really tricky. So sometimes you develop something and it's a great idea, but then there's also a cascade effect of things that you have to account for. So iterations are super important that way.

One of the other things that was really pivotal in how this design moved forward was one of the preconceived notions that we had. And that was that we were going to be capturing, or excuse me, we were going to have live references for all the geometry that's coming into the Boolean operation. And what that allows me to do is easily grab that object in the scene, make changes to its position, or items that might be sitting on the stack. And then that gets all live referenced into the Boolean operation.

And talking to one of our key customers that was giving us some really good professional feedback, he uses it all the time and he was like, hey, I can't have these live references sitting in the scene. It's a lot of additional weight. And I think it's going to affect performance. And is there a way that we can treat this so it's really pared down and economical and I can guarantee that my performance is where it needs to be?

And so we had to switch based off of that feedback and us scratching our heads a little bit. It's like, OK, well, how else might we deal with this? And so part of it was just capturing these operands internal into the modifier and making it really very efficient. But that was a big change that we made partway through the development. And that's why it's so critical that we get that kind of feedback so we can make those changes on the fly, if necessary.

In addition, there's always just cool aha kind of moments when customers are playing with the functionality. Because as much as you try to be farsighted and visionary about how something like this can work, customers are always going to use these very powerful tools in ways that you hadn't originally imagined. And we have to capitalize on that and make sure that we're facilitating their ability to do the clever things that they're coming up with.

Logan pointed to early on that diagram of the Agile development, and it looks really nice and clean as this kind of cycle of development. But as you're going around it, it looks actually kind of linear. Unfortunately, that isn't always the case when you're developing something. Sometimes there are either technical challenges or logistical challenges, scheduling challenges that things change. And a really fun one happened.

At the time it was, kind of took our attention away on something else that we needed to do, but the net result was really positive. So we were developing the Boolean modifier. But at the same time, or partway through that development, we started developing a brand new modifier, which was the array modifier, which was really powerful. And we immediately saw some nice synergy between these two.

So the peanut butter and chocolate combination. Array is able to create a whole bunch of objects in different geometric configurations and randomizations and all this kind of good stuff. But what we realized pretty quickly is like, hey, this works really well in combination with Booleans. So for example, maybe I need to put a series of ventilation holes or something like that in the side of this container.

Or I need some kind of radial array of little features on some piece of geometry. Well, the combination of array and Boolean together really facilitated doing those kind of operations and opened up a world of opportunities for our artists, the modelers that use these tools, to all of a sudden use really interesting new combinations. And we wanted to facilitate that, as well. So we knew that we needed to get further along with the array and get it to the point where we could release it and then continue on our work with the Boolean modifier so that we could use these things in combination.

So sometimes development isn't linear, but it can be really good to be aware of that. And sometimes it's super advantageous. You got to make those kind of choices as you're doing development.

LOGAN FOSTER: I'm going to give Mike a little bit of a breather because he's done a great job of explaining all the design process. But at this point, we were doing really good. We had been making some good progress on the Booleans workflow, but we had this really kind of cool idea. We've been exploring and experimenting with these things called OpenVDB and volumes to do different modeling operations. And we thought, why not use it for Booleans?

VDB has this ability to do the basic union subtraction intersection operations that we see within the Boolean operations. So why not try it here? Because it exposes a lot of very cool new workflows of ways to operate, not just with mesh data and geometry, but 3ds Max itself. And so luckily, the way that we configured this Boolean modifier, we'd set it up, made it actually really easy for us to just almost literally drop in OpenVDB to provide a volume meshing kind of operation within it.

And at this point, we really started to unlock some very cool workflows that just maybe weren't as possible before because when you're dealing with a lot of polygon data, it can be slow, it can be cumbersome. You can have some little errors that come in. Where VDB solves it. So you can start to create a lot of very interesting and very cool organic shapes and unique meshes and intersections of objects and things like that coming together and working together to build some really interesting things.

And so when we think about that here, we see this really good example of Chang Suyun did. He's one of our beta testers and he's a VFX artist. But he was utilizing the whole 3ds Max modifier stack to basically do this really cool, really complex animation. Well, not even an animation, but just generative way to build train data that we see here in this animation. And really it's very simple when you look at the breakdown of it, which I've kind of tried to show off on the right hand side images.

But Chang Suyun has this array of these yellow boxes. These yellow boxes are then being arrayed again with more objects being distributed upon them on these very long, elongated rectangular cubes that we kind of see here in the second top right example. These are then all meshed together and created together as one unified form with the volume Boolean, something that's really hard to do with a traditional polygon Boolean.

And then from there, he's just subdividing, adding more detail to it and using the data channel modifier to colorize it. And then actually distribute these little grass fronds that you see on top of it. And all through that, we can drive the entire result just through some simple randomization functionality that's built into the array. And all of a sudden, we've got this very cool, very unique procedural generation tool that you don't need to have a lot of complexity to.

It's very easy to understand when you look at how this is broken down and think about the way that the 3ds Max modifier stack works. And this was really kind of getting to that powerful nature of the software that we wanted to get into. Because it's not just about building one cool piece of functionality, it's about building a cool piece of functionality that works with all the other cool functionality we've given before it.

MICHAEL SPAW: One of the other key things that we have to do is make sure that our tools are really ready for prime time. And it's not just doing simple little examples. We've got to pressure test the tools. And doing a level of pressure testing that is analogous to what you would do in a production context sometimes can be really tough. It's hard to know exactly how hard an artist is going to use a particular or push a particular tool.

Booleans are one of those cases that in its logical extreme, can be used to build entire models. It could be the cornerstone of a modeling workflow. And we were fortunate enough to get to work with a professional concept artist, Fausto Demartini, who has some great credits, screen credits for big feature films. And this just happened to be one of the tools that he uses as part of his toolbox to create the kind of forms and concepts that he's pitching for feature film work.

And he's not being easy with it. And so he was a great resource that we were able to use to not only pressure test and make sure that everything was functionally working correctly, but to really help craft our response in the design portion of it. As I mentioned earlier, we had this notion that we were going to have a whole bunch of live references and that would make things really easy for artists to move them around and understand and where they were located and their form. And to be able to make changes to them interactively.

But Fausto really helped us reanalyze that problem. And you can see from this example of this mech that he built, there's just a huge number of operations that he's doing. And that kind of complexity and making sure that they all work reliably and economically in the scene is a real boon for us, to make sure that we're creating professional ready tools. So we really appreciate his feedback and all the feedback that we get from all of our other professional artists that help us on both the beta and the charter.

LOGAN FOSTER: Well, that gets us to where we are today. So the Boolean modifier itself was shipped in 2023, so 3ds Max 2024. It was pretty close to a full year development. It was more like eight months, a little bit longer than our estimate that we wanted it to be. But I think it was OK that we were like this. As Mike said, we were working on Array at the same time. We needed to get that out the door because it was ready to go. But it was also good to have that extra bit of gestation period to ensure that we built something that really mattered and spoke to customers and what they wanted from a Boolean system.

So first up, I'm going to show just a little bit of a showcase here of what exactly we have the Boolean modifier today. So like Mike said, it's a Boolean system. This first example I'm going to show off is the live referencing going on. So live referencing is really cool. It's really neat if you need to use animations or you just want to start moving and tweaking your objects around.

But if you've got a shape or if you build like you do with Fausto, where he is animating his object and kind of getting into a posed form for its final state doesn't work so well. So in this case, I've reset the scene. I'm now using the captured operands. And I'm capturing some of the basic shapes of my scene here. So not only am I capturing now the material information that was on those objects, but I'm also capturing things like the smoothing groups and the UVs and all this really other cool stuff that's in there. And I'm seeing it all updates and be updated for me within this operand list that we see here inside of 3ds Max.

So as I'm selecting more objects, it's very easy for me to go in and make changes. I can do different types of operation types. We've got seven now that we ship with the Boolean modifier, including the new split operation. But really the hearts of the modifier itself is this ability to get into the details and modify things. So we can see the shapes here. We can see that we have full access to the modifier stack. So it's almost like a reverse branching situation where there's a bunch of branches coming in and up into the Boolean modifier itself.

But I've also got this ability to change the operation types at a moment's notice. Super easy to do. I can reorder the operations and change the outputs on them. I can turn things off. I can turn things on. It makes it incredibly powerful to go back and be very iterative and be a true modeler and make these modifications to it. And when I like what I've built, we added this really cool ability that we discovered while we were building it called creates objects.

And what this is going to do is it's going to create a copy of your mesh with all of that variations on it. So if you're starting to think about USE workflows with variants and variations, this is right up that kind of alley of being super quick, super easy to make different types of work on your meshes, create a copy of it, make it work, and make it work for you in a very simple and elegant way, which we're going to see a lot in this next video that we're going to look at.

So for those of you that remember, earlier this year, Autodesk partnered with ILM to do a build your own droid concept. Now, as a Autodesk employee, I'm not allowed to go into it, but I still want to make a Droid, so this is what I got built up. It's a little VV8 style Droid and this is the workflow that I built for them. This first little bit here is just really showing off this antenna structure I wanted to make.

And I wanted to use the Array modifier for this so I can make different antenna variants that's going on here. And when I like the variant that I had, I'm just using the Boolean modifier and making a clone of it. So I'm joining it all together. I'm going back down into the modifier stack. I'm using the randomization parameters of the Array and just kind of creating a little antenna variance for it. And this will come in handy later on when I start using the Array again with this Boolean output that I've generated.

So I wanted to create three different antenna variants, simple, really quick and easy to use. And then this is going to show off a little example that you can use with the Boolean itself. So Boolean has an operation built into it called attach. And attach is really useful because I now have three distinct separate elements that are in my shape here, and I'm going to use these as the ability to randomly distribute with the array these different antennas over top. And it's going to randomly choose one of the three elements.

So this next little bit here, I've got a little bit of a paneling that I built up with some splines, a little bit of a shell modifier. And then I'm using something called conform, which is a new modifier reintroduced into 3ds Max to adhere to the shape of the shell of the Droid. So if you think about this in the past as an artist, this is really hard to do because you'd have to perfectly form, build these panel pieces to fit. But instead, I've just got something that just snaps right to it, so it's automatically deforming, constraining to it.

And then I can just use the Boolean on it to subtract it out and I can start getting these panel lines in. Same with these other little panel bits here. I'm just using Array, very simple, very easy to use. And I'm just going to add them in and union them. And now I've got the shape all built up, so it's all nice and one continuous mesh.

For this next little bit here, I'm just going to use Array to create a little bit of a random distribution pattern for the antennas that I want in here. I don't want it to be perfect. I want a little bit of like a asymmetrical look to it, also. I'm just using the remove functionality of Array, randomizing it till I get the pattern I want. I'm then applying it here to that original antenna shape that I built up. I'm setting that up and I'm just pasting the same array on top of it.

Subtracting out the pieces so I've have a nice little hole. And then I'm just aligning it, setting up the array. So it's just these little antenna bits fit perfectly within that little shape that I cut out. So this way now I go back to the beginning. That original shape that I built up, those antenna, they're going to line up and fit in perfectly there. And it's all driven with the proceduralism of the Boolean and the Array.

And when I start thinking about the body of this Droid, there's a lot of paneling that goes on here. And so I'm just going to use the Boolean. And this time, I'm going to use the split operation to take an array of planes to slice the middle and a little bit of the top and a little bit of the bottom apart. So I've got these different elements within the mesh. And as you can see with split, it's building these perfectly fine, watertight manifold geometry pieces here.

And then I'm just grabbing a couple elements off of that and I'm going to apply a second Boolean, and this is where the Boolean modifier really gets cool, I feel, because you can start applying Booleans on top of Booleans and top of Booleans and getting these really cool shapes. You don't have to do it all at once. You can think about it as an order of operations that makes sense to you as an artist.

So in this case, I've applied it. I've got these options here. I'm now throwing a chamfer modifier on top just to give a little bit of smoothing to that look so you can catch some of the edge highlights. And then I'm going to do another set of Booleans that are going to apply here. So I've got some extra shapes that I've built up and then arranged out within the array modifier that we're going to see here in a second.

And so I'm going to use these, and I'm going to Boolean these shapes away from the mesh result that I've got. And normally at this point with the legacy Booleans, this is where an artist would be like going, no, no, no, no, no, no, this is not going to work. But with the Boolean modifier, it works perfectly. I've cut into the shape. I've got a successful object here.

I've transferred my material down, which is exactly what I want. And now I'm just going to finish things up by just adding these extra little details, which are just once again, shapes that are built up with Array. I'm going to conform them to the shape. I can decide to Boolean them if I want to. And I'm going to set it up and get it all arranged so that I get the final detailing that I want for my little VV8 style Droid.

Very simple, very easy, very elegant. I know this is a person that worked on it. Let's use this tool a lot saying it, but you can have a lot of success and a lot of easy success with the Array, with the Boolean modifier and the workflow that it empowers and it unlocks for you as an artist and as a creator.

So really what I said. We think about the Boolean modifier. It comes down to three core things that we really did with this. Making things simple, intuitive, fun. Returning trust back to the modifier and the Boolean modifier itself and the Boolean workflow itself and making Boolean a thing that you want to work with as a core modeling feature. And we want to enable data to flow in the modifier stack, which I think from these examples we've shown so far, and the ones you're going to see in a little bit more, you can definitely see that we've enabled that data to flow and work.

So here's a very interesting quote we got from one of our users that we were talking to. And I think this one speaks really well to just the general frustrations of Booleans used to bring, and the positivity that you see now with this Boolean modifier workflow that we brought inside of 3ds Max. So Booleans shouldn't be a thing that professional artists know how to work with and how to clean up and operate. They should just work. Students shouldn't struggle. People shouldn't struggle working with Booleans. And this is what we've succeeded, I feel, with the Boolean modifier itself.

And this isn't just something that we can say is a feeling from one user or a select many users. We look back at this analytics data that we captured. If you remember back to the previous slides before, we've actually done a really good job in just one year of putting this Boolean modifier out. So we've doubled the amount of people that are actually like unique users that are actually using the Boolean modifier itself to have success. And they're using it five times more per month than before. Both great numbers to have.

But I think what speaks to us from a modeling team and probably speaks really well to Mike, is the fact that now we're seeing almost 91% of all the Boolean uses be the Boolean modifier. That is amazing. So we've reduced that confusion and we've empowered people to just have an amazing amount of success with it.

So next up, we're going to look at some case studies that were provided to us by a few select users were able to contact for AU. And hopefully, you're going to learn a little bit from them, as well. So our first set of tips comes from a user called Paul Neale. And Paul is a educator and a modeler and does a lot of really good stuff. You've probably seen his work in the Max community.

PAUL NEALE: Hi, I'm Paul Neale. I've been around the industry some 30 years, worked in all sorts of industries from games to films to broadcast to medical, military, aerospace and everything. Everything above and below. I do a lot of modeling, but also a lot of technical art. And one of the things I do for a lot of my clients is find fast ways of being able to achieve great results.

In this particular case, I'm using the Boolean modifier, Array modifier and procedural objects. Essentially, 99.9% of this set is these objects is all procedural, so anything can be changed along the way. Adjusted, tweaked. You can get versions of the elements, which is really the nice part is it's very quick for versioning out something and making those changes if you model this way.

So with objects like this, it really looks like it's complicated. And, there's no way you could go about just procedurally modeling something like this. But with the Boolean modifier and the Array modifier, it's completely possible to get this. This is 100% procedural, what you're seeing here. Let's just take a look at this sort of breakdown this one and how I've used it. So I've used weighted normals to make sure that everything is shaded properly with a chamfer to round all, take all the edges off again.

There's your game level model, there's your feature film model, basically. So this is literally just a circle. So a show end result off. You can see it's just a circle in here. And you can see that I can adjust the diameter of this just by changing the parametric values. It's extruded. So again, same thing. I can extrude it up and down and it's going to change everything. Taper modifier on it. And then all that magic is happening in the Boolean modifier here.

So in this case, what I've got is just a model that is completely procedurally built out of other models. And when you click on them, there you go. We've got a taper modifier, in this case, tapering out. And it's connecting these two together in the Boolean modifier. And so you can pick and choose. In this case, I'm just unioning them together. Allen bolt holes are being placed in. And again, these can easily be changed the radius of them, the mount of them because it's just on an Array modifier again, which is one of my favorite modifiers going. It's just so flexible.

And as you start building that up and building up elements, you can really start to put together a model very, very quickly. What's nice really about this is, something like this hatch, you might want variations of it for your final product. You don't want to see the same thing when you're running down a hallway over and over and over again. So it's pretty easy to just make a change and turn something off. So it allows you speed of change.

And of course you've also got the ideas, the art directors looking over your shoulder and says, hey, can you add one more of those? Yep, not a problem. Can you take that one away? Yep.

MICHAEL SPAW: Yeah. So as we move forward, one of the cool things is 3ds Max gets used in a lot of different contexts. Everything from visual effects to games to architectural visualization. And quite often, it stays kind of in the digital realm, whether it be an image or an animation. But sometimes it also enters back into the physical world, which is actually cool because so much of what Autodesk engenders is kind of make. Seeing our digital technology manifest itself as something that's real that we can interact with. And Max does that, as well.

So going from a digital model into a physical creation is something that Tom Hudson, who's one of the developers, also does model building and 3D printing and laser cutting and all kinds of fun things like that. And he happened to be using both the Boolean and the Array functionality that was created in that time span to create some physical items, as well.

TOM HUDSON: My name is Tom Hudson. I'm a developer on 3ds Max, but I've also been a model builder for most of my life. So the idea was to start with the model of the Star Trek Galileo shuttlecraft. My thought was I would mesh that up with a lunar tank from the TV show Space 1999. And I used 3ds Max for all the modeling on the various add on pieces. This first piece here is a door assembly. This is the way it started was this general shape that I wanted to work with.

I then extruded that out into 3D with the extrude modifier. And then I went in with the edit poly modifier and using smart extrude. But the real fun stuff started when I got in to the finishing. This uses the Boolean modifier. And you'll see the Boolean modifier is assembling a lot of smaller pieces, some of which are being added, some of which are being subtracted. And it basically goes through this sequence that gives me this final piece with basically the back cutout. Subtract out the stuff that I don't care about or I don't want to waste material on so I can make it kind of hollow on the back.

And then what's really fun here is some of these subobjects inside here that are used as additional pieces. For example, this box here. This is actually one box that's been arrayed with the Array modifier. And you'll see that they were trimmed to fit the profile of what they were going to be attached to on the final model. So here it is printed and you can see how it fits against the side of this model.

A separate part of this model was a laser cannon type object. I wanted to do some kind of traditional model making in terms of the barrels of this object I was going to make out of brass tubing because it's stronger than a 3D print. And then I'd have these 3D printed kind of accessories that went on. And there's several of these. There's this piece here. And that's in itself what started out as a Boolean assembly and it's been collapsed to an editable poly.

There's another piece that was a Boolean assembly just similar to the way the door was done. I subtracted out places here on the sides where it would be, where a pivot would be inserted. And there's other details that are modeled in that's all done with the Boolean modifier and the Array modifier. So here's the final piece as it was assembled. Again, these are brass tubes. And then these 3D printed subassemblies have just been glued onto that tube. So the same model has a cockpit with a pilot's chair with some hand controls and some control consoles and things like that.

This has a clear bubble canopy type setup on it. And then I modeled this top cap to be form fitting with that hemisphere. And I used the Boolean modifier to subtract that hemisphere from this. And it turned out to be exactly form fitting onto the hemispherical clear dome. So lots of fun. Nice model. And here's the finished piece with all the painted parts on it.

LOGAN FOSTER: And last, but certainly not least, we've asked our good friend Chang Suyun, who is a VFX artist-- extremely talented VFX artist who's worked on a ton of movies-- to talk a little bit about how he's developed some very cool technical tools, very simply, very easily, using Booleans. And he's going to share a little bit about one of these such tools or methods with us here.

CHANG SUYUN: So yesterday I made this play procedural. I actually did as a live. Just in case, I have to do redo again. But basically. it was a box, right. And then it is Array. The first one is Array. just like a regular Array. And then working on only solvable then. So I select only those elements and then Booleaning.

So it's again, it's Array. It's a great array, but it incrementally like scale up. So it has this what is the medium ring. That's here. So I only break up certain elements because you never actually all the crack goes it is not going for other like that the chunk. So and then select another pat badge and then break up with the different array and then select remaining and break it.

And obviously, the extra elements, then you can use the DCM. If you change anything here. Let's say, if I change a rotation, and then you see it procedurally changes. So this is the one example of what you believe modifier provides. So this is really handy. This, without doing, without scripting to do this. Yeah, this is really heavy.

LOGAN FOSTER: So that's it. That's the end of our presentation. We want to give a special thanks to all of our speakers that were able to help us out. Paul Neale, Tom Hudson, Chang Suyun. We also want to thank Fausto Demartini for all his assistance and support that he gave us with producing the Boolean modifier. And just the great feedback really drove us as a team to produce the great quality and the great results that now everyone gets to have in their hands.

I want to say thanks to Jose Elizardo for his help with reviewing the deck, giving us some good feedback on it. And of course, a giant shout out to the 3ds Max community, the beta community, the stack community, everybody out there. Your support, your feedback for 3ds Max has been fantastic. And it continues to drive us to do great things. So thank you so much with it.

So wrapping up, please, of course, give us your feedback on this talk through the AU portal. We'd love to learn more about whether you like this talk or whether you hated it and just thought it was a waste of your time. Who knows? But just please give us your feedback on it. If you did like it, maybe it can help us do more talks like this in the future for AU.

If you're interested at all, we invite you to sign up for the 3ds Max beta. It is free for anyone to join. We are always looking for people that are wanting to help out, wanting to assist and provide a great feedback. There is some great new Learning Channel material on Boolean and Array that was recently uploaded by Autodesk, so you can check that out in the Autodesk YouTube Learning Channel.

Of course, reach out to Mike and myself after AU to talk more about Max, the Boolean system, whatever you want to talk about related to 3D modeling and 3D production. We're always, always wanting to hear it. And of course, utilize that ideas page to continue to help drive innovation for Max. It's super important. It does get noticed. So don't think that you're just throwing ideas out to the dark with it.

That said, we'll open for a little bit of Q&A. I guess if you're watching this online, we will be answering your questions maybe a little bit afterwards, but hopefully we'll get to them and go from there. So thank you very much. Enjoy your Autodesk University.

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We use AgrantSEM to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by AgrantSEM. Ads are based on both AgrantSEM data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that AgrantSEM has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to AgrantSEM to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. AgrantSEM Privacy Policy
Bidtellect
We use Bidtellect to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by Bidtellect. Ads are based on both Bidtellect data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that Bidtellect has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to Bidtellect to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. Bidtellect Privacy Policy
Bing
We use Bing to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by Bing. Ads are based on both Bing data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that Bing has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to Bing to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. Bing Privacy Policy
G2Crowd
We use G2Crowd to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by G2Crowd. Ads are based on both G2Crowd data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that G2Crowd has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to G2Crowd to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. G2Crowd Privacy Policy
NMPI Display
We use NMPI Display to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by NMPI Display. Ads are based on both NMPI Display data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that NMPI Display has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to NMPI Display to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. NMPI Display Privacy Policy
VK
We use VK to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by VK. Ads are based on both VK data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that VK has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to VK to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. VK Privacy Policy
Adobe Target
We use Adobe Target to test new features on our sites and customize your experience of these features. To do this, we collect behavioral data while you’re on our sites. This data may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, your IP address or device ID, your Autodesk ID, and others. You may experience a different version of our sites based on feature testing, or view personalized content based on your visitor attributes. Adobe Target Privacy Policy
Google Analytics (Advertising)
We use Google Analytics (Advertising) to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by Google Analytics (Advertising). Ads are based on both Google Analytics (Advertising) data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that Google Analytics (Advertising) has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to Google Analytics (Advertising) to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. Google Analytics (Advertising) Privacy Policy
Trendkite
We use Trendkite to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by Trendkite. Ads are based on both Trendkite data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that Trendkite has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to Trendkite to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. Trendkite Privacy Policy
Hotjar
We use Hotjar to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by Hotjar. Ads are based on both Hotjar data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that Hotjar has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to Hotjar to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. Hotjar Privacy Policy
6 Sense
We use 6 Sense to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by 6 Sense. Ads are based on both 6 Sense data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that 6 Sense has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to 6 Sense to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. 6 Sense Privacy Policy
Terminus
We use Terminus to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by Terminus. Ads are based on both Terminus data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that Terminus has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to Terminus to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. Terminus Privacy Policy
StackAdapt
We use StackAdapt to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by StackAdapt. Ads are based on both StackAdapt data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that StackAdapt has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to StackAdapt to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. StackAdapt Privacy Policy
The Trade Desk
We use The Trade Desk to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by The Trade Desk. Ads are based on both The Trade Desk data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that The Trade Desk has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to The Trade Desk to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. The Trade Desk Privacy Policy
RollWorks
We use RollWorks to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by RollWorks. Ads are based on both RollWorks data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that RollWorks has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to RollWorks to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. RollWorks Privacy Policy

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