| Warning: You must have purchased a C-key to use this tutorial!! Boolean operations on meshes can be performed using the C-key feature called "Intersection." Even though I've had my C-key for a while, I had a hard time visualizing how it worked. I hope this tutorial helps those of you like me. |
| Let's start with the typical scene. A plane and 2 lamps. That's my default setup. |
| Next let's add an Icosphere, which is is a mesh object. |
| Hit TAB key to get out of the icosphere's edit mode. select the plane and hit TAB to get into it's edit mode. Edit mode by the way is when you can edit a mesh's invidual vertices or points. Press your "a" key to select all 4 vertices of the plane. |
| While you are still in the editmode. hit the subdivide button 5 times. It should look something like this: |
| Hit TAB to get out of the plane's editmode and select the sphere again scale it a little bigger. make sure that the sphere passes through the plain. With the sphere selected hold down the shift key and right click on the plane. Now the plane and sphere are both selected. Press Ctrl-j to "join" the meshes into one unit. Now hit the TAB button and the sphere and the plane should BOTH be in edit mode. |
| After intersection your meshes should look something like this |
| Here I'll switch to a shaded 3d window display to see the boolean seperations better. What Blender does when the intersection button is hit divide up the meshes in various parts. The divisions take place at the lines where different meshes intersect. You can delete or move these parts to get what you want. To select a part, move the cursor over and hit Lkey which selects "linked" parts of an object. |
| For example I remove the top of the sphere by putting my cursor over a vertex of the top half of the sphere and pressing the Lkey. |
| Once selected you can move the part or delete or move it to another layer with the Mkey. It's up to you. play around with the part and try different meshes. Have fun. |
| I made this final image while writing this tutorial. |
