A plugin or definition dealing with crystalline growth? Like a geode?

[closedcurve (Weston)]

Not sure where to start on this one, these are so chaotic. A simplified approach would be to use Delaunay triangulation on a curved surface, I’m guessing?

[laurent_delrieu]

The closest I know is for a single crystal

Grasshopper and Brazil gemstones

9 gemstones made with the attached Grasshopper file and rendered in Brazil. CrystalMaker.gh (12.5 KB) [image]

Crystal Maker Test Gems with .IOR in Thea Render

Hey, I did a test in Thea Render with @DavidRutten 's “Crystal Maker” Grasshopper tool: I used a tiny 0.01 Edge Softening for some subtle edge-highlights and all the materials are lab-measured gems using .ior files for diamond (most of the gems in the background), ruby, sapphire, amethyst, aquamarine, emerald, tourmaline and titanium dioxide (lower right). (Some of the colours are quite subtle in this size of just a few millimetres…) The only light is from a HDRI, so the caustics are not as …

And SnowFlake

Snowflakes

Here is a rendered view (-viewcapturetoclipboard of rendered view of Rhino 6) of my new snow crystal growth on mesh. [snow flakes on balls] See Render with V-ray3.4 [snowflakes on balls vray] Alpha = 1 Beta = 0.3 Gamma =0.0001 5000 iterations Sphere mesh with ~320 000 faces

[closedcurve (Weston)]

Thanks, I’ll play with those.

[laurent_delrieu]

Voronoi Cell seems to be the perfect tool.

There are some added plugin, the mandatory is Dual Mesh, could be replaced by some Voronoi

Skeletal mesh

The convex Hull is just there to make some rough triangulated mesh.

Here a try using some part of sphere, then remesh (rough) using Ngon Plugin (work best sometimes than MeshMachineStatic)

I added an option for the back size.
If not enough spicky, lower the angle and put more value of scale for the bounding box scaling.
crystal growth on surface v2.gh (46.9 KB)

[anon39580149]

Check this as well

study3.gh (46.6 KB)

[laurent_delrieu]

Another variation with fixed number of sides, perfects (regular?) or less perfect. With end perfect or not …

crystal growth on surface perfect crystal.gh (49.9 KB)

[closedcurve (Weston)]

Amazing! It goes a little crazy when I put in more organic trimmed/deformed surface through, “perfect crystal” goes ape. The “V2” handles it a bit better but I’m wondering how to take more control, to break up repetition and symmetry.

crystal growth on surface v2 with organic mesh.gh (323.0 KB)

[laurent_delrieu]

What is important is the mesh, depending on it the dual mesh gives the size of the crystal.
So you need to remesh with triangles your surface.
Your mesh

The dual mesh it gives

Dual mesh of the surface remeshed (unsing remesher from Ngon plugin)

“Topology matters”

20201019_crystal growth on surface.gh (377.1 KB)

20201019_crystal growth perfect crystal.gh (382.1 KB)

Fast render

[closedcurve (Weston)]

That’s beautiful, had a hell of a time trying to union everything afterwards, the front and back. Even harder time cutting it in cross sections but I did a little SLA test print.

[laurent_delrieu]

Thanks for showing the result. Have you some more pictures ? Surface quality seems good.

[closedcurve (Weston)]

Just a first test, I’m going to scale it up much larger in three sections to max out print area and bond it together using resin and a UV light. Hopefully that’ll get me a decent size chunk for a lighting test, playing with photography props. I’ll post the results.