[Stiglr]

Mossie speaks the truth: booleans are almost never worth it. You'll spend more time cleaning up the mess you create with that so-called "instant operation" than if you did it "manually".

Find an imaginative way to produce the same result, while maintaining a tidy model.

Here's one example... When building aircraft wings, I almost always have to cut out irregularly shaped wheelbay openings. Here's one area where, *if* it would really work, it'd be ideal to do a boolean cut.

But, the way I approach it is:

1) The wheel well. I'll create a disc which has the same number of sides as the wheel I'll later put inside the well. I'll place it below the wing geometry and go to wireframe mode. Then, working in the "bottom" view, I'll use the disc as a visual tracing guide, and use the knife tool and adding new vertices to cut surfaces and arrange vertexes in the same places along the wing as where my tracing guide (and aircraft 3-view) suggests. And as I'm doing this, I can identify areas to combine or split to create the neatest solution for the shapes that I can. When I'm finished, I'll have the wheel well, the bay doors and any other cuts in the wing neatly outlined, so they're easy to intrude into the wing (to create the wells) and to separate and thicken the doors (that will later be attached to the landing gear stalks themselves).

This might take a good 15 mins or half an hour... but contrast that to the HOURS I've spent trying to clean up the mess caused by a single boolean cut of the same complexity... and even then, wasn't 100% sure I'd fixed all the problems (which would crop up much later, when trying to optimize a model for import into a game engine).