I'm trying to follow the ProCutter description in the documentation for 3ds Max 9. What I have: A fairly intricate terrain mesh, closed (i e, carved out of the top of a box). The terrain has canyons. What I want to do: Use a succession of boxes to carve this terrain into zone-shaped chunks, where I can add portals to the other chunks. The player will never rise above the bottom of the canyons. In the ProCutter description, I should add ProCutter to one cutting shape. Then I set options (retain material, extract mesh, explode elements), and pick a stock element (the terrain). What SHOULD happen, according to my reading of the documentation, is that the intersection between the box and the terrain should become one mesh, and the rest of the terrain (stock) should become another. However, the box stays, and the rest of the stock has its material removed?! How can I do what I want? I will post some screen shots of what I'm doing soon.

i've never heard of or use the procutter tool, however couldn't you just collapse it into an editable poly mesh and then select the sections you want and say "detach" in the edit polygonal menu (all using the polygon selection tool)? do this for all of your sections and each section will be a seperate mesh.

Then the edges become jagged -- I want straight edges, because they should line up with portal zones in the C4 engine.

What I ended up doing was using the regular Boolean modifier, with the Cut option. That works, but takes more time than the description of ProCutter claims that that would take. So I would still like to understand that tool.

Just guessing, but maybe it needs to be a closed mesh? I try to avoid booleans at all costs so I'm not sure.

You could also select all the polygons, and use the Slice plane to divide up the model, with Split checked, to divide the model into chunks- then just detach the elements it creates.

I've used Procutter before, but I don't quite understand your question. Can you please rephrase it?