From the course: 3ds Max 2026 Essential Training

Combining meshes with Boolean modifier - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2026 Essential Training

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Combining meshes with Boolean modifier

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- [Instructor] To begin the chapter on polygon modeling, I'd like to start with the Boolean modifier. Booleans are operations to combine meshes. We can add meshes together, subtract them from one another, find their intersection or overlapping volume and so on, and the output we get will be a perfectly clean mesh. If you have any experience with Booleans in older versions of 3ds Max or in other programs, you may have encountered some issues, but the Boolean modifier in the current version of Max is very robust so be prepared for some pleasant surprises. It's really hard to break. In the bad old days, an object like this would probably need to be modified a little bit in order to make it not cause problems in the Boolean operation, but now we don't need to worry about that so much. I've got the walls of my courtyard, and I'm going to use these boxes to subtract holes for portals for doors and windows. I'll select that wall object, go to the modify panel, just to point out that it is an editable spline that's been extruded, and, again, in the bad old days, we would probably want to convert this to Editable Poly before doing any Boolean operation, but now the modifier is so robust that we don't have to worry about that. From the modifier list, I'll add the Boolean modifier, and the very first thing we want to remember to do is to enable the switch that says Use Live Reference. What that's going to do is when we add the different objects to this modifier, the original objects are going to be kept in the scene, so that gives us the ability to remove operands from this Boolean operation later, but still be able to recover them because the original objects will still be in the scene. If this is off, then when we add something to the list of operands, it's going to be removed from the scene and swallowed by this current object. That's not how I recommend that anyone work really. We want to turn Use Live Reference on. Then we have these buttons up here to add operands, and we can find the union, we can find the intersection, we can subtract one operand from another and so on. That's what we want. We want to subtract. Click on the button on the upper right, and that's to add new operands of the type subtract. Then we can click on one of these boxes and boom, it's created a portal, and the geometry is pretty clean. I'll turn that button off so I'm not adding any more. Just to illustrate that, we can select an operand in the list, and we see it displayed in wireframe with kind of a x-ray blue, and we can use the Move tool or any other transform tool and manipulate that in real-time. Pretty cool. All right, I'll undo that with Control-Z and add the rest of the operands. I'll click to deselect that one. We'll go up here to add more subtract operands, go around and tumble and select all of these one at a time, just click on them all, and we can see it's very robust, we're not having any issues, and our geometry looks pretty clean. Great, so I can turn that Add Operands button off again. That's really all there is to it. In the list of operands, we can go in and do things like turn them on and off, or we can change their operation. Instead of a subtract operation, I can turn this into let's say a union operation. We're just going to add that volume instead of subtracting it. Okay, I'll go back to Subtract. I can remove operands from the list. For example, this Box005, I can click on the trash can icon and that's removed from the list, but because we had Use Live Reference enabled, that box is still in the scene, I can go to the Scene Explorer, and Box005 was the one in question. When we add them as operands, they just get hidden in the scene but they're still here. I can re-enable visibility for Box005 and I've got it back, and I can simply click on the Subtract button and add that operand back in. Awesome. So that is the basics of using the Boolean modifier.

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