This really stupid problem has been around since the unions first came out, and I keep checking every month or so to see if it’s been fixed and it still hasn’t been, and it really gets in the way of me making anything with CSG. It’s also particularly infuriating, so I’d really like to see it fixed.
It seems like there’s some sort of handedness problem when you try to “shave off” parts of a model using CSG. That is, if you try to subtract a small section at the corner of a piece using a large negated block. Now, some issues with unioning are okay, but this one is particularly infuriating because it seems to work with one handedness but not another. That is, if you construct one side of your model just fine using the technique, and then reflect your model over, it doesn’t work on the other side, for the exact same configuration, and small “bumping” of the positions doesn’t fix it either, it just pain doesn’t seem to work with one handedness. So, you’re left screwed where you’ve made half of your model but it’s impossible to complete the other half, pretty frustrating.
I have several cool CSG models which I started and was unable to finish because of this problem.
This case always gets me when I work on character models. Everything’s great until I mirror across the x-axis and it doesn’t work. :uhhh:
It wouldn’t help solve this case, but I wouldn’t mind a button that mirrors a union across x/y/z axis – or even a general mirror(x/y/z) button :imagine:
edit:
Has anyone tried making something that awkwardly-mirrors parts? (shuffles the x/y/z axis while mirroring symmetric-shaped parts) I’m curious if it would help
“Has anyone tried making something that awkwardly-mirrors parts? (shuffles the x/y/z axis while mirroring symmetric-shaped parts) I’m curious if it would help”
I’ve tried, and it’s subtly and devilishly hard to actually do fully. I tried a few times, but was never able to really crack the problem, only construct some special cases.
“Has anyone tried making something that awkwardly-mirrors parts? (shuffles the x/y/z axis while mirroring symmetric-shaped parts) I’m curious if it would help”
Works for the positions and rotations only of Square and Wedge parts. Getting CornerWedgeParts and SurfaceType replacement to work correctly is significantly trickier, and I haven’t been able to do it.
Unfortunately that’s not usually an option, nor does it usually fix it. The underlying bad case still needs to be fixed even if it does solve it in some cases.
Edit: It doesn’t work for me. Can you actually send me a copy of that unioned model? I could really use it.
[quote] “union the two negatives together and then union”
Unfortunately that’s not usually an option, nor does it usually fix it. The underlying bad case still needs to be fixed even if it does solve it in some cases. [/quote]
everything is an option if you copy and paste enough times
“everything is an option if you copy and paste enough times”
In my experience, that does not work. Also, I have most of these parts in very specific positions to sort of “save” their offsets relative to a model modulo one stud increments, so I can’t just start randomly moving them around to try to make it work.
I was having a very similar and frustrating issue with a block of mine today. However, when I got it to solve and realized there was an issue it wouldn’t separate and decided to continuously crash. I can no longer use this brick and have to remake it.
EDIT: Please note that when it solved there was no particular method I just kept messing around and it finally worked.
I get a stupid amount of unsolvable unions. I loved the feature at first but it’s gotten to the point where it’s nearly useless because so many things just never work, shutting down your work.
Agreed, the amount of studio crashes is completely impossible to deal with. Union a complex thing and it’s never going to separate or union again, and you’re stuck with that chunk with nowhere to go.
That’s why you should always save a backup of the parts you unioned so you can recover them if necessary. You can put them in ServerStorage if you don’t want to clutter the workspace.
[quote] “everything is an option if you copy and paste enough times”
In my experience, that does not work. Also, I have most of these parts in very specific positions to sort of “save” their offsets relative to a model modulo one stud increments, so I can’t just start randomly moving them around to try to make it work. [/quote]
I’m talking about saving your progress on unioning, not testing to see if the coordinates of parts have an effect (I have casually observed that they don’t, but I have made serious observations that rotation does heavily impact unionability, and so does making features near the edges of a UnionOperation or NegativePart)
AdmiralLennox is completely correct: copying what you have made is really the only way to go because CSG isn’t that stable but you can force it to do what you want with enough different tries, and after GT4, un-unioning doesn’t really do anything except crash studio, so if you don’t keep backups you’ll either have to give up or make it again from scratch.
