It’s been a delight to hear your feedback and solutions on the next generational architecture approach!
Today, I’d like to disguss and get some opinions on some alternative solutions regarding the 3D printing pattern generation.
Below is an example from a company called WASP, which beautifully modeled a parametric dome.
As a start, I decided to use this design with an adjustable Metaball Custom approach as an example to replicate and generate more variations of parametric walls for the new designs we are working on.
However it wasn’t so easy for me as a intermediate user to even finish this!
- Question1:
What would be the solution in creating this type of parametric walls?
New Alternative 1? :
I simply tried to create 2 point list with offest curve and build interpolate in between. However feeling that might be way more smooter solution and potential to do alternative models especially with Graph Mapper controls. Whats your thoughts on that?
Problem 1:
Also I realized Divide Curve creating some disturbances of the geometry due to curve length and giving me these uneven sections (in red) . but of greens what would I need I guess…
Question 2:
Also what would be your suggestions to generate a smooth loft action that blends all walls in a good way?
I tried to split the list and group them individually - but shortly I realised that’s not the solution (also I don’t want to manually edit the list like what I did, so I can play with the different geometries from the Metaball without issues)
Question 3:
What can be the solution for the doorways like the example image? Kinda blending to the wall geometry…
Question 4:
What would be the different approaches of your choice to create some beautiful designs with 3D printing solutions?
All ideas are more than welcome
Thank you for this amazing community one more time! Never seen the amount of support in this forum, in anywhere before… Thank you all…
ps: already bought this book, but cannot waiting the shipping:))
Not an exact solution but maybe trying to process domes in a group of twos seperately might lead you to an idea, Or reordering the process order may work.
Thank you for the comments @caganpekkucuk
It was one of my goals to keep them connected into a Metaball so I can add and optimize other shapes and forms as one…
However not sure how to achieve the above questions/problems.
For 3D printing it’s important to understand that there are 2 parts to the printing process: defining the geometry to be printed, and creating the machine code that drives the device that does the actual printing. The second part is completely separate from the first part and is typically handled by software called slicers.
A 3rd component is, of course, the machine that does the physical printing. Each printing machine has it’s own physical limits, so it’s important, when designing geometry to be printed, to not allow the geometry to exceed the printing machines physical limits.
In the 2nd photo in your initial post it looks to me like the outside walls are the original geometry definition, and the curvy inside walls are what’s called “infill” that is generated by the slicer software. The machine parts shown in the first photo don’t make it clear what the physical extents of the print head are, but my guess is that each dome shape is a separate entity that is printed individually. I think it would be quite difficult/costly to design a machine that could hold correct tolerances over the the entire shape of all the domes.
So my guess is that each dome is defined individually and then they are arranged in the desired overall shape. After this the overlapping parts are eliminated (Solid Differences) and the resulting geometry is printed dome by dome.
Here’s an example of a print I made some time ago that sort of shows how this works:
Thank you so much for the reply and your suggestions @Birk_Binnard
Approaching individually to the spheres can be a good approach - I agree. That would eliminate many issues overall… However, what I read was that the company I shared above has the ability to sync their printers to work simultaneously on complex designs live above. So what I heard is they formed that design altogether. But for now, I’ll practice individual forms:)
In that case, another question forms : how to smooth the these complex intersections (red) as like Metaball example (green) ?
Complex is correct - those are tricky intersection curves for sure. It was not an accident that the shapes I showed above were plain spheres.
One answer to your question is a single word: fillets. I’ve used lots of fillets for things I’ve printed, but never with an intersection curve as complex at those. I don’t know if the GH/Rhino fillet routine could successfully process an intersection like that - it would be an interesting experiment to find out. But doing that would not be easy - fillets are based on 3D surface edges that are either convex or concave, and your geometry is loaded with curves of both types, only 2 of which matter to you. And those 2 are full of both concave and convex areas.
My guess is someone here will have an idea of how to approach this given the geometry you posted. Your best bet is to post the GH file you used to make those things. There are many people here who know a lot more than I do about how to design complex geometry that will work in the real world.
“Parrents” is not an English word, but I assume you refer to the surface texture of the underlying smooth spherical shapes. GH is especially useful for designing surface textures - there are many postings here that show how to make many different types. But to do that you have to have a basic idea of what you want the surface to look like. For example, here’s one I did a while ago:
It would probably be helpful if you contacted the company that would actually build these things. I’m sure they have some parameters of their own that they need to meet due to the physical limitations of the machines they use.
Graph mapper is an interesting GH component for sure. It is not a favorite of David Rutten, and he’s the person who wrote it. I’ve used it a few times and found that it’s not so easy to predict what it’s results would end up producing. Plus it can happen that very small changes to it’s input can produce very large changes in final results. There is a GH add-on component that adds additional curve types to the Graph Mapper repertoire, but I haven’t tried that one.
Yes, fillet wont be the best ideal solution in complex concave-convex situations like the example I shared. And yeah definitely looking for some ideas on that…
Thank you for your example too @Birk_Binnard , do you have a good lead/tutorial for me to check how to create different surface textures? (I’ll search forum too)
And yes, I’m contacting with the 3D printer company to understand their requirements bit more further. - Just want to prepare some design variations to be ready…
There are lots of GH tutorials online that show how to make surface textures. This is one of the more well-known ones: Parametric House. Some of the tutorials have been helpful for me, but many of them require some GH add-on that I don’t have.
In most cases I’ve managed to use only standard GH components for my designs. I’ve actually been pleasantly surprised with the number of different and distinct things GH can do. I’ve posted more than 400 designs online, so if you want to take the time to page through them here’s the link: my designs. They are listed from newest to oldest; if you find something that looks interesting to you I can explain how I did it and/or clean up my GH script and send it to you.
I loaded your GH file and saw that you are doing things very similar to stuff I’ve done in the past. So I added one of my clusters that makes star shapes. The cluster makes it easy to generate all sorts of star shapes; it only took me a few minutes to replicate a result very similar to yours.
Hey @laurent_delrieu thats a great post!!!
I was trying to understand your methodology, but due to my level of GH, I couldn’t figure it out from the picture. Do you mind sharing the file so I can try to reconstruct and understand better your way?
Also @laurent_delrieu , what do you suggest for anyone who wants to learn your Nautilus plugin? it seems quite awesome things can be achieved, but getting bit lost as a new user… Do you have any tutorials or documentation we can study?
If a component is a paid version (it will output partial results), it could be replaced with its free version.
For Nautilus plugin I advise to upload the examples. Inside the folders I put images so you can look at what could be useful and open the script. I don’t do Video tutorial.
I hope it helps.
If you set angle to 0° you will have paths going along
Hello
Not on my pc now but you could test it with the component named quite the same and free. For this kind of geometry i think the result will be quite the same.
(also I don’t want to manually edit the list like what I did, so I can play with the different geometries from the Metaball without issues)
