Creating / deleting inset faces to make holes using geometry nodes

Question

I can cut out different parts of a cube using Mesh Boolean Nodes and the Difference option using geometry nodes. see image below.

But how can I Inset faces in a specific area using geometry nodes and cut holes based on those insets without using several Mesh Boolean nodes?

Note: The reason I want to do this is that the Mesh Boolean node in geometry nodes can be very memory consuming / slows things down when using several of the Mesh Boolean nodes. Modelling an object fully in geometry nodes without using several Mesh Boolean nodes would make it parametric along with improving performance.

Answer 1

Here's one way you can do that:

1. Extrude and scale the front face

   

2. Extrude it a bit into the box

   

3. ...and then extrude it again almost to the back side

   

4. Extrude and scale the top face in the same way

   

5. Scale it also by the same value a bit into the box

   

6. Then just remove the superfluous faces and merge the vertices

   

7. Finally scale the box a little bit

   

Here is the node group overview:

Here is the blend file:

Answer 2

Would an extrusion by 0 followed by a scaling of elements do it for you?

This one's a scale towards element-center, rather than a fixed-width inset, which would be a few more nodes..