V8 engine exhaust collector

sketchfab

I'm testing out an older model that refused to render in BlenderInternal, but now it's working like a charm after I upgraded to the latest version. Yesterday, my model stopped rendering altogether in BlenderInternal, and I was stumped - no error log or message was anywhere to be found. I had envisioned adding some animation where a collector rotates around the exhausts, collecting pulses and feeding them into a turbine, but it might have just been a pipe dream in my head. To troubleshoot, I've done some preliminary tests on reconfiguring the top cylinder surface. Since Blender boolean doesn't care about mesh holes as long as they don't intersect with other meshes, I planned to model the valve region as a rotating body, add some triangles for an onion-like shape, and use array mirror to create a near-mirror effect that accounts for edge cases when performing boolean union, triangulation, decimation, collapse, and flatness. Then, I'd simply subtract this from a flat plane.