Blender 3D and Cork boolean addon, a duo that saves lives and rebuilds heritage

Hi there!

Cork adapted to Blender open up a huge range of possibilities, especially when we talk about 3D printing field. On the one hand the Blender native boolean tool is excellent for simpler parts and asking for a test results in real time, on the other Cork is powerful with more complex meshes and requires a great processing power.


We developed an add-on [available soon] that put Cork inside Blender and can help in a lot of projects in the fields of: Veterinary Medicine, Dentistry, Archeology and heritage.

More details here: http://arc-team-open-research.blogspot.com.br/2016/01/blender-3d-and-cork-duo-that-saves.html

A big hug!

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Very nice, this is the project you mentioned right?

I don’t know exactly what are the differences between the Carve and the Cork libraries, based on the images you posted it looks like Cork triangulates the meshes more effectively. I will look into comparisons and tests in the future.

Don’t forget that this would essentially be a third boolean algorithm in Blender (alongside Carve and Blender’s new custom solution by Campbell).

It looks like the person who started the topic already stated the strengths and weaknesses of Cork that have been previously mentioned on this forum(so it may not be the best idea to use it for most general modeling tasks). The way I see it, the biggest impact it could have for general users is by way of using objects to edit the geometry of a high-resolution Dyntopo sculpt (where Carve may not crash but still hang for several minutes, I don’t have any data on how well Campbell’s algorithm would perform in this case).

The only thing is the potential impact on performance if this ends up making use of Python (which means a potentially major slowdown if the addon requires shuttling the mesh to a separate app. and then back to Blender). Though perhaps it’s possible they might have some fast transfer solution compatible with the GPL like what is seen with the addon for Luxrender.

This raises a few questions for me:

how does this cork library compare to the inbuilt library campbell has implemented recently?
if this gets implemented into blender, who will be maintaining the updates to cork?
does cork have an active community behind it if there are bugs and what not?
one note i noticed on the github is that it outputs triangle meshes… how does this work with ngons?

high res mesh booleans in Blender ? OMG ! YES!

Is this thread dead? I am very much in need of a boolean add-on that works consistently in Blender 2.77. I can use cork externally but it is time consuming…

Hi @cogitas3d! Any news about the addon? :smiley:

Hi my friends!

@n1k0l4 it is ready! --> https://github.com/dfelinto/cork-on-blender

sorry for the necrobump, but can you port the add-ons to 2.80? It’s much more reliable than blender’s internal boolean solver and bouncing back and forth between 2 blenders is… uncomfortable

Hi, sorry for bumping. Does anybody have an .exe of cork? The link from the repo is down, also not archived in archive.org. I tried building it, but can’t figure out how to include the mpir library correctly…

I’m desperately searching for a better boolean workflow in blender. BMesh and Exact solver both fail so often, and Carve is gone… Thanks!