by Mohd. Itqan

Hello there. This tutorial gives an introduction of ProCutter & ProBoolean compound objects in 3ds max. You must be thinking why to use these than the traditional ones? It is because these tools give us the flexibilty to subtract many object from a single object at a time. I'll show you in this tutorial. You'll require 3d max 9 because ProCutter & ProBoolean are new in 3d max 9.

1.First of all you need to download this file.
Open the file you have downloaded. The scene contains an egg crate with eggs on it.

2.If you render the scene, it looks fine. But, if you move an egg up, you will notice that the box doesn't have holes in which eggs are put. Hhmm ... serious problem that needs to be corrected. Llets get to work.

Undo the movement of egg if you have moved it up. Now, select the boxxy crate. Go to Create>Geometry and choose Compound Objects from drop down list. Click on ProBoolean button.

3.Make sure 'Move' is selected in Pick Boolean rollout & 'Subtraction' is selected in Parameters rollout. Now, click Start Picking button. Now, start clicking on eggs one by one until you subtract all the eggs. As you can see this would take much more time if you want to do this using traditonal boolean.

4.Now, we will cut the crate into parts, each part having one hole. From the Selection sets menu choose 'Hidden divisons'. Click Yes button in the dialog box. Selected hidden division boxes will show up.

5.Select one of the box and click ProCutter button (Create>Geometry>Compound Objects).
(Tip: You can select the leftmost box so that you won't forget which box you have clicked on and haven't)

6. Turn on Stock Outside Cutter, Auto Extract Mesh, and Explode by Elements. Then click Pick Cutter Objects button. Now click on all the boxes (not the crate) one by one.

Auto Extract Mesh, and Explode by Elements will make sliced object detaches into a separate object automatically.

Stock Outside Cutter lets you have the result contains the parts of the stock outside of all of the cutters.

Stock Inside Cutter lets you have the result contains the parts of the stock inside of all of the cutters

7. Now, click Pick Stock Object button.Then click object you want to cut (box crate). Wait til 3d max finshes cutting calculations. If you see the top viewport, you will see that our crate has turned colourful. This means that all the crate is cut into parts.

6. Right click to exit ProCutter menu. Select those division boxes we used to cut the crate and delete them. Now, we have small crate for each egg. But, OOPS! we have deleted the eggs. Really? NO. Go to Selection Sets menu and choose 'Hidden eggs' and you have the eggs back at place.

Try to move one small box crate. They are now separate objects.

The tutorial is now complete.

Any question or comments regarding this tutorial should be sent to:
Mohd. Itqan, email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

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