I am really sick of poor boolean operations in Blender, whether it’s the 2.76b or the trunk. At one point or another it fails miserably and also ruins my mesh permanently. It leaves a lot of non-manifold parts and sometimes loose parts on the mesh.
Is there an app that performs boolean operations on meshes better than Blender?
You could try 3D-Coat’s voxel sculpting, where you can do boolean operations all day long and not have to worry about topology. It does have it’s own caveats though and you need a video card with as much memory as you can get (my 2Gb 460 works fine). You can then convert your voxels to polys and/or retopologize at any time.
I tried MeshLab, and it said my mesh wasn’t water tight. I am guessing after doing many boolean ops in Blender, it degraded my mesh (I was joining various rocks to achieve a rock formation).
Even after I closed holes and stuff, somehow I still can’t do boolean. Might try cleaning mesh after each boolean op and see if that helps.
Try Groboto, it is the best piece of software, regarding booleans, that someone can buy in a so low price. It is an app designed from artists, an art work by itself. It is the predecessor, somehow, of Modo’s so well known plugin ‘Meshfusion’ (made by the same developers).