Hi All,
Another new user trialling Rhino. Sorry if you all attend to these regularly - but I’d greatly appreciate some guidance here.
1st up - long time cadd user for more boring civil design duties… I’ll possibly have some future questions related to my work and how Rhino can assist, but for now: Hobby / Passion project → Fishing Lure Design.
Ultimately, my goal is:
→ Design hollow carefully engineered lures with lovely visual exteriors and carefully engineered interiors
→ Print prototypes on 3D printer to refine and test and balance
→ Ultimately run production via 3rd party plastics company using ABS or PC plastic via moulds or any other high productivity processes(?)
My current design workflow has been in Blender, using very high SubD and mesh density and then displacement and UV maps to use dispalcement greyscale pngs (created in inkscape) to displace the shaping of a lure exterior. It looks stunning (in my opinion) and is such a nice non-destructive workflow for me (create blank; subD down to ridiculous density ~2M polys; want to update or tweak push / pull?.. just update vector map and it adjusts for me without tweaking base mesh…). Results look like this:
But now, with Google AI as my mildly competent but wildly scattered tutor, I’ve been told: "hey this looks great, just don’t forget you can’t actually use that to create production moulds from a dense mesh like this → it needs to be nurbs or another mathematic geometry for CNC to mill out the moulds…”… This is months after starting this journey lol… With Google AI steering me down this rabbit hole of displacement which I now think I love… Grr…
Anyway, I’ve been trying to integrate this high density mesh or displacement workflow into rhino as my “engineering platform” ffor creating the int ernals and actual shells / halves, but yes: the massive 2M poly mesh does not play well; and using a mesh in rhino is not it’s strength.
I’ve tried all blender options I can find to remesh or simplify and all are no good so far. I’ve tried rhino’s quad remesh (at e.g. 20,000 which is high but significantly less than the e.g. 2M poly original):
It’s honestly pretty good… but it’s falling apart (e.g. side fins lose detail), unpredictable (some geometry jumps around incorrectly) and not a good workflow in my opinion for those reasons…
So…
QUESTIONS:
a) Is this true… a 2M poly mesh is unmillable with CNC or not suited to high production moulding? (e.g. Must be nurbs or sudD or another math / curve system)? E.g. if I just stayed in blender with crazy poly counts, is the result likely to be unusable for production moulds and therefore this is a broken design pathway I need to abandon…?
b) Is my intended workflow of 2M poly Blender object (displace / shape / model) → Rhino (split, engineer internals, create final lure halves for moulds and printing) salvageable?
c) is there some kind of practical nurbs alternative for using a displacement mesh or vectors in a non destructive way where I can expect this level of detail (as per original blender images above)?
d)…is it really that: if I want to use rhino and trial it properly, I should probably just design lures from scratch in rhino and use its strengths → nurbs etc… and just abandon the vector displacement approach altogether for this trial, and approach design with the aesthetic capabilities of rhino as the goal, not with the approach of “how can I displace using grayscale maps with high detail in rhino like I want to”… because it’s not really the design pathway rhino is good at?
I honestly greatly appreciate any insight or assistance. I’m about to explore d) above, but want to make sure I’m not steering down a long new journey when I can actually salvage my blender displacement workflow…
