The above is just a basic example. Violet-ish thing is a curvy surface. Orange-ish thing a theoretical planar average of the complex surface.
The Why (TL:DR is fine past this point unless you’re curious)
I’ll clarify why I want this since I might not be asking the best question for what I’m doing. The ultimate goal for virtually everything I do in Rhino is a plug to make a fiberglass mold. This is done by using a CNC router to cut the surface in a foam model board. The foam is 2 inches thick, so I spend a lot of time in Rhino manually arranging 2x24x96 inch blocks to capture my surface features as efficiently as possible.
This isn’t so bad when the surface is somewhat flat, but can be a nightmare of a puzzle when the surface is highly curvy. Like this one I’m currently working on that is the total opposite of being 2 inch layer friendly:
Thanks Pascal! Never seen extractrendermesh before, but that combination did exactly what I asked for! Now I just need to play with it for a while to see if getting what I asked for actually makes things faster.
My business is manufacturing hovercraft. We’re building the tooling to produce the next generation model and I did the majority of the design work in Rhino.
Hi Jason - the render mesh is a quick and dirty way to extract a point sampling from the surfaces - the resulting plane will be different -hopefully only slightly in most cases - depending on the density and distribution of the render mesh. You can also use the Mesh command and the detailed controls to generate a more controlled mesh.
I think I have an approach in Grasshopper to do this semi-automatically.
The object is remeshed and the angle between each vertex and its neighbours is calculated. The smaller the domain, the more flat is the area between the points. Sort of. Point groups can be created and from there it isn’t too difficult to bake boxes as blocks. At the moment the boxes need to be resized manually and at least some of the sizing could be automated too. Below are a few screenshot, the last showing a quick boolean subtraction. I know it takes a little more than that…
Martin, I’m so sorry I just now saw that there were additional replies!
THANK YOU Your post looks great so I’ll give it a try. This is sufficiently complicated that there will always be manual work involved. But even if it only provides a clue for where to get started that would be a time saver. I’m pretty decent with Rhino. Learning Grasshopper has been on my “want to do” list for some time, but so far I’ve only tinkered with it occasionally. This is a great excuse to spend more time in it.
If you still want a file to play with let me know.
Thanks for the reply. It’s for sure a complicated application with lots of variables and stuff like that catches my attention
I’m excited to try my approach with one of your files. If you can’t share it here, you can also send it to me by email and if you need a NDA signed just let me know.
