Can Rhino produce a mesh of only triangles?

I’m designing some lab glassware (pilot plant) and run into a bit of a problem. I decided to start with the simplest part, the round bottom reaction vessel, first creating a 215mm dia. sphere and splitting it in half for the bottom. Then creating a 215mm dia. cylinder to get the right volume, boolean union the two solids and shell (Whoa! Rhino does shelling now? Cool!) with a 7.5mm wall. The nurbs wireframe and Rhino shaded both looked fine BUT eventually this all has to go into RealFlow. In fact, I can do all the simulations and animations within RF. My RF import options are .lwo, .lwo. and, of course, .lwo.

The problem is that no matter what I do, on .lwo export Rhino produces a mesh consisting of triangles and quads. RF won’t load the quads. RF doesn’t like the quads. (And now I suspect it doesn’t like me.) So when I import the vessel anything that isn’t a triangle is missing.

I tried Daniel Piker’s MeshMachine plug-in and love the mesh it produces but it falls apart at the 7.5mm rim producing an edge that looks like chipped glass. This tells me it probably wouldn’t handle the details on the final assembly.

So, is there some way to force Rhino to produce a mesh that only consists of triangles? Or should I just put the muzzle in my mouth now? :o)

Maybe the TriangulateMesh command can help… --Mitch

You know… I tried TriangulateMesh, TriangulateNonPlanarQuads and TriangulateRenderMeshes to no avail. So you suggest it, I try it again and, of course, it works.

Are you and my workstation having a thing behind my back? raises eyebrow

I probably tried one of the second two twice and thought I’d tried them all. Like I always say “There’s no sense being a dumb polak if you can’t show it once in a while.”

Thanks, Helvetosaur… I mean Mitch. :o)