Making A Bookshelf With Boole

Let’s say you want to make a bookshelf. One way to accomplish this would be to use Cinema 4D’s Boole tool.

Boole:
What Boole does, is it cuts out the shape of one polygon, on to another polygon, kind of like a customizable cookie-cutter.

In order to use this for a bookshelf, lets take a cube primitive and resize it to roughly the shape of a bookshelf. Now copy and paste it, then scale the new primitive down a bit, and pull it so that it’s partially sticking out of the old bigger rectangle.  Adjust the new rectangle so that it leaves a narrow margin around it where the bigger one is. 

Once you have that in place, go to the Nurbs menu and select ‘Boole’. Like all the other Nurbs, it will drop a ‘Boole’ object on to your object manager.  To use it, FIRST parent the object that’ll be making the hole, on to the Boole, THEN parent the object that’s getting the hole. So in this case, take the newer/smaller rectangle and parent it to the Boole, then parent the larger rectangle to the Boole, and you should automatically notice that your larger rectangle just got a chunk taken out of it in the form of your smaller rectangle. From there, you could just use flattened rectangle primitives for shelves.

Now what if you want to create a die, but don’t want to have to go through the trouble of Booling each semi-spherical indent onto your cube individually?   For a situation like that, you could just select all the spheres you plan to use as holes and group them (Option+G). Then all you’d have to do would be to parent that group as the first object under the Boole, followed by your cube, and you should have a nicely Boole'd die.

P.S.: Whenever you’re finished modeling with any of these Nurbs, remember to always right click on the Nurbs in your object manager, and select ‘Current State To Object’. This will turn your Nurb group into a single simplified polygon; it will be important to remember this for keeping your geometry complexity low to improve the performance of your game.