Shapemerge is a lifesaver for landscape work, but occasionally I come across a bug that means the shapes I draw don’t work with shapemerge.
http://www.reformstudios.com/01-img/forums/shapemerge\_bug.max
Plese try to cut the attached spline from the mesh… when I try, nothing happens… either with shapemerge or boolean. I’ve tried resetting xform on both objects, and collapsing to mesh and redefining the spline…
All objects were drawn and not made directly from imported DWG data…
Any ideas?
If I extrude the shape through the mesh, Boolean works fine for me…how long has the “cut” feature been available in the standard boolean operation? It seems to work much like shapemerge, and in this case it works where shapemerge will not.
Thanks bee.. I’ll check that out in the morn… given my past experiences with booleans I’d given up on booleaning in favour of shapemerges so didn’t give much hope in extruding and booling…
good to know there’s always a way!
Tempermental little tool that.
I have one absolute rule when using booleans, I never stack the operations. If I have multiple cuts or voids in the same object, I will collapse all of the subtraction geometry into a single edit mesh. If I have to add/remove cuts or voids to/from that object, I will navigate within the boolean to the edit mesh and attach/delete by element. If it is unlikely that the object will change, I will collapse it because booleans tend to become more faulty the more you have in the scene. You also have to be careful of how complex the edit mesh becomes within the boolean.
I cannot even imagine what it would be like to work in a max where everything does as you expect. My job would probably be much more boring.
That cut tool does work but it makes a meal of my beautifully clean mesh; adding edges where there wasn’t any before. 
I’ll see what my autodesk reseller has to say about the issue.
Well, whudduyuknow… subdividing the spline before shapemerging fixes the problem… no need to boolean 
Joy.
Be careful, what appears as a clean mesh in the viewport is not always a clean mesh. Go into vertex mode on your object and check the inner edge…the same polys are there, they are just not visible until you run the boolean operation.
If you are planning on doing much deformation to this object, you may encounter some issues. Otherwise you should be good to go.
To create a “clean” deformable mesh in this scenario, I would probably use the tube primative and delete all polys but the cap using an edit poly mod. Of course, I do not know your intention with the grid pattern, so if that is necessary, this approach might not work.
That is good to know about the shapemerge, thanks for sharing!