Boolean Operations in CATIA

Here is a quick explanation about Boolean Operations in CATIA and how you can use it in your project. It is hard to do without these techniques and it is always recommended (to beginners) to know how to use them early enough.

A Boolean operation is similar to what is taught in Math, in fact this principle is borrowed from mathematical principle. It allows you to add, subtract geometries or simply find the intersection between 2 or more geometries.

ADD, SUBTRACT, INTERSECT are the basic Boolean operations. There are few other operations in CATIA, like Remove Lump, Union Trim and Assemble. But we are going to focus only on three basic Boolean operations mentioned earlier.

Before diving into it, we need to understand that when we create some features, CATIA treats those features as a single part, hence we are unable to perform Boolean operation in a single ‘Body’. In order to perform Boolean operation we need to ‘add bodies’ and then we can operate those bodies to get result.

In the Insert menu you will find ‘Body’ option.

Many bodies such as this one can be Added, Subtracted or Intersected from each other. When you click on Insert Body, a body will appear in Specification Tree.

You can change the name of the body from its Properties. To activate a body, right click on it and click ‘Define In Work Object’. The underline denotes that the body is active.

ADD operation

This operation is used to add one body to another.

Here we have created two Pad features in two different bodies and we are going to perform the add operation on them. Body.2 includes a rectangular cube and Body.3 includes a cylinder.

To add Body.3 into Body.2,

1. Click on Body.3.
2. Go to Insert – Boolean Operations.
3. Click on ADD.

You will get the following figure as result.

REMOVE Operation

Similar to ADD but subtracts one body from another. While using Boolean operations we should always keep in mind the body which has to be extracted and the one that should be the principal body. In this case, if we want to create a hole in Body.2 then we have to Remove Body.3 from Body.2.

To remove Body.3 from Body.2,

1. Click on Body.3.
2. Go to Insert – Boolean Operations.
3. Click on REMOVE.

We should get following result.

Try removing Body.2 from Body.3, to observe the difference.

INTERSECT Operation

Intersect keeps the intersecting portion of the bodies and removes the remaining geometry. Here we will create intersection of two cylinders.

To intersect Body.3 with Body.2,

1. Click on Body.3.
2. Go to Insert – Boolean Operations.
3. Click on INTERSECT.

We will get following result.

Using solely this technique, you will find it easy to draw the following figure in CATIA.

Note- Features like Edge fillet, Chamfer etc. are to be used after getting basic object. These features should not be created using Boolean operations.