Chromodoris mesh and voxels

An here my test, it works better when input data are clearly given !
With 1 iteration of smoothing


With 6 iterations of smoothing


dendro mesh tube and mesh.gh (1.8 MB)

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Hi @ForestOwl,
Chromodoris probably isn’t the best tool for this purpose (spefically the surface part). It’s design to work on dense point clouds, and is optimized for that specific purpose. Lines convert very easily to point clouds, whereas meshes or surfaces do not. Cocoon, Dendro, and other isosurfacing tools are likely a better option here, as while they may (or may not) have less performance on pure point cloud data, they support higher degrees of customization in a more ‘grasshopper’ flavour. Unless you have significantly more geometry than what’s shown in the image the performance will be fine. For context the mace image in your original post had >1million lines that all had to be surfaced at around a 0.3mm thickness. This is perhaps an order of magnitude or two more computationally heavy than most isosurfacing tasks.

That said, to achieve this with Chromodoris you’d more or less be looking at converting your geometry into points and then surfacing that. I’d suggest that you’re better off using curves and assigning them weights rather than using boxes. The surface/mesh itself is a little tricker as you’d need a way of distributing points over it. Easy with a surface, difficult with a mesh, though contouring in multiple axis and dividing the contours may do a reasonable job.

As far as meshes like this go:
image
image
It is an isosurface with variable density. Simply assigning weights with the points and easily achievable with Chromodoris. So it’s essentially a curve, divided into points, where each point is assigned a weight (presumably using a curve, surface or mesh attractor). When the weights are high enough, or the points are dense enough, it creates surface/volume.

As a side note, the detail of the mace where the swirls blend into the handle (surface) is made by creating an isosurface with variable thickness (density increasing toward the handle), then using a boolean intersection (in magics, the mesh was a bit too dense for Rhino to even pan around in…) to create a surface finish. Essentially the same as the above technique, using a guide mesh/surface as an attractor to calculate the point densities before isosurfacing.

If you’re just trying to mash some curves/tubes/pipes etc. onto a surface and smooth them then one of the other isosurfacing plugins, or the Z-brush method are probably better bets.

Cheers
Cam

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