Hi
So I'm at my wits end about how to go about this. My file was created originally in maya and was made up of 5 parts that I managed to strong arm boolean into merging...now the problem is I cant hollow it out
My method for hollowing in maya was to duplicate my mesh (tone down the tris since the inside doesn't have to be pretty) and then do a boolean difference but that seems to just crash my maya with some "failed to save in ...." error or just makes the mesh disappear, as boolean usually does. However I don't know if maybe the duplicate is just too complicated to boolean because I tried merging a cube to it and the boolean works fine. I also don't know if difference and union act differently in that sense.
Then I searched around in the forums, tried blender which I finally got the thickness however when trying to add exist holes that just exploded. I also tried thickening it in blender then reexporting it back to maya....and it just disappears. If i click on it in the outliner it shows up like in the image, BUT does not register as a mesh when I try booleans.
BTW I've never used blender before so maybe I'm doing it wrong?
Is there any alternative to this process that doesn't require booleans or exploding meshes? :/ Any help would be
greatly appreciated as I've been spending several weekends trying to figure this out. I'm about to try Rhino3D as another attempt but I'm not expecting any miracles...
The image shows what it should look like, what happens in blender when I use a cylinder to cut a hole, and how it looks like in maya when i import the blender file using obj.
If anything, can someone please tell me whats wrong with my file to be causing all these problems? please please please please