I’m having a problem which I’ve searched the internet high and low for and haven’t been able to find any good, easy solutions to. What I’m trying to do is take a model of a character for example, pose it and then take the nagative of the model, as if you were to make a mold out of it. The problem is that, well, say you took a model and posed it in such a way that some of the outer polygons ended up inside the model. You would have internal self intersections. Because of this, neither regular nor pro-booleans will take the model and do anything useful with it. Both can make both operands disappear and crash max, which isn’t productive. Basically I need a way of isolating the outer polygons from the internal ones. So i need to remove the self intersections of the model.

The reason I need the negative to make a mold, is because that’s what I’m making. If you don’t know what it is, go to wikipedia and look up ‘CNC’. When I discovered these things existed years ago, I was in shock and awe. Being an engineering student, I built one haha.

The closest thing I’ve found that can do what I’m looking for is the plugin found below. Look at the second image:

http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/315336

But I don’t want to spend money on a boolean plugin, when max already has two. And max was a christmas present cause I couldn’t afford it myself anyways. (Too bad there’s no such thing as a good mesh boolean for complex models).

It was already suggested to just flip the normals, but like I said, the internal mesh that exists would interfere.

Help??