gregjohn wrote:
> 
> I had already Applied the Displacement Modifier before attempting a Boolean.
> Can you give me more clues about multires?
> What good would subdivision surfaces do? -- I can only imagine harm, and I
> wasn't using them.

The multires option in this case probably wouldn't be the best thing to 
use. Subdivision surfaces give you more control, and you can adjust it 
to give you more or less detail before you make it permanent.

Here's what I did to get cube/height-field booleans to work in Blender:

1) added a mesh plane (the future height field)
2) added a subsurf modifier with the Simple Subdivision method, not 
Catmull-Clark
3) added a displace modifier
4) applied both modifiers to the plane, thus making the changes permanent
5) added and applied a decimate modifier to reduce the number of 
triangles in the plane, while trying to keep a good amount of detail
6) moved the object to another layer
7) added a cube to layer 1 and then added a boolean modifier pointing to 
the modified plane
8) applied the boolean to the cube (making it permanent) so Blender 
didn't take forever to recalculate it every time I tried to do something

It's best to do all the complex operations first, and then apply them 
before attempting a boolean operation. Also, boolean operations don't 
make the second object invisible, so to see the effect more clearly you 
have to make it invisible yourself. The easiest way to do this is simply 
to move it into an unchecked layer.

High-triangle meshes combined with boolean operations can be very slow 
to compute, and extremely memory-intensive. This is why I suggested that 
you decimate the "height field" to reduce the total number of triangles. 
You can also delete faces that you know won't affect the outcome. The 
most likely reason for Blender crashing on you is that somehow you ended 
up using all your RAM. I crash Blender this way more than any other :(

I hope this helps~

Sam

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