Suggestion: Apply a "boolean" operator between interpenetrated faces.

More or less like Sketchup or new ZBrush R7 does.
The only diference with common booleans, is they just needs one object.


For the union at least, the new Intersect tool committed to Master may do what you want.

As for the subtraction and intersection (especially if you’re not first making a selection), the difficult part would be for the algorithm to determine how to make the cuts after it detects the regions of intersecting faces. Such a thing may or may not be out of scope for 2.72 at the least, but if Zbrush is able to do this in a predictable way then I don’t see why it can’t eventually be in Blender.

In the case of subtraction, how would the operator determine which part of the mesh is the “subtractor” and which part is getting subtracted?

With a selection, presumably.

If I’m not wrong, the new intersection tool makes all these parts separately, you can get the first without the second or the second without the first, their union or intersection, you have just to choose what you need and discard the rest (and remove doubles).

EDIT: Well, that’s not exact, it makes all the needed parts, after that you have to work a bit by yourself to obtain the boolean object.

paolo

Thanks Ace Dragon, I didn’t know "Intersect tool " yet. Nice to see it.
As Sourvinos says, this tool does half of the job, maybe it’s enough.
When I proposed boolean between interpenetrated faces, I was thinking to combine extrudes and subtracting, like the new picture. With some tweaking I can get the results I want, but maybe it could be done automatically.

SkechtUp extrudes inwards more elegantly. But I think mixing extrudes and booleans is more versatile.


Regarding this, I think Sketchup had the Pull/Push patented. I don’t know if the patent had expired or people from Pixologic found a way around it.
Found a link:

Under patents.

Shouldn’t this type of functionality be added to the ‘Extrude’ operator instead of its own tool?

It would basically be the tool checking for the presence of coplanar faces as a result of the operation and cut/delete accordingly.

Maybe Campbell could include a checkbox for ‘delete inward faces’ and see how that works? Not sure if that would break some other part of the tool, but it seems like that’s some of what’s happening there. I don’t think Sketchup can patent normal direction, although Google did patent 3 point lighting or some such stupidity.

The recent lighting patent that was derided by masses of people was filed by Amazon, not Google (at least in the articles I read).

Yes, Ace, thanks for the correction. I misremembered. something seems similar about the two companies to me, I guess!