Can’t select Boolean object after beveling it—bug?

Question

I want to bevel the side edges of the selected boolean. You can see I have another Boolean above and sort of around it (they are not joined). At this point, these three Booleans work fine. Time to bevel the edges...

Just for reference, when I hide the Boolean, nothing is there. Seems obvious—but this will make sense in a second. Ok, let’s bevel.

The bevel isn’t working how I want—ok, well I know, let’s try applying the scale.

What on earth? Ok, the bevel is now working but it looks like we have overlapping geometry now? Merge by distance. Nope. Ok, well, let’s select the main Boolean object and check it out.

Ok hold on—I simply clicked on the main object and now it’s all one object? Strange.

Fine, let’s tab into edit mode. But the Boolean object isn’t selectable now. Not even in wireframe.

Ok, let’s flick into local view.

Tab to Edit mode and...

Gone. At this point, I can’t even select the Boolean object again. I just have to restart the file. I can go back to non-local object mode and stare at the glitchy overlapping geometry but that’s it. What is going on here?

Thanks everyone,

John

Answer 1

Got it.

The solution is to pull back your Boolean object’s bevel offset. Set it back just a hair under the clamp overlap threshold (to 0.015m in my case whereas 0.016m caused the clamp overlap to kick in). To speculate on why: when clamp overlap is turned on and at maximum it might be creating overlapping vertices where the bevels meet. It reminds me of how sometimes when beveling for smooth round edges you get an odd crease in the middle which is also mitigated by reducing the bevel offset to just under the threshold (Chipp Walters talks about this in his Nitrox 3D series).

Hope this could help someone in the future, Happy Blending!

John