I have created several groups, which in my model happen to be a bridge, stonework, glass beads, and retaining wall block. Once again, this is several groups, which I have now combined into one group. I have created a second group which is stone base material, and I want to move it into the above combined group, and somehow intersect, or carve out the area from my top group, into the bottom group. I do not know if this is possible. I see the bottom group is a solid, but the top is just a combination of several groups. Any help would be appreciated.
Option 1: Old Fashion Way – Take copies of your underlying elements and the stone base > explode them all into raw geometry > select all the raw geometry and Intersect Selection. This will merge all the elements together. Now just remove the faces they you dont want. This should leave you with the negative.
Option 2: Solid Tools way – Take copies of your underlying elements and the stone base. Go into the Underlying elements group and making it all one solid. You will need to follow the rules of making a solid if you want to use the Union tool to do this. > Once it is a solid you can take it and merge it with the solid stone base and use the Subtract tool to get the negative. (Example below)
Thank you so much Chris for getting back to me. This took me a while, and it was painful, but I learned a lot. I have to remember that as I work, I need to delete any extra lines, or guide points. I accidentally had lines and guide points in my groups, and I was not able to turn them into solids. So, after xray mode, I finally was able to get rid of these. Thanks also for the You Tube video, this helped. I am attaching what I did, I think I have it, but there may be a few mistakes. I can see knowing these tools will be of great value in the future.
For future reference, be aware that you can delete all your guidelines and guide points by using Edit>Delete Guides . This will remove all the guide type entities from your model.
