I am a total Rhino beginner and hope that my question is right here. My problem is simply explained. I have imported a complex file as stl. and after the conversion I have a closed solid. What bothers me while working is that the object consists of countless surfaces (see picture).
Is there a way to rebuild the object so that the surfaces next to each other become one clean surface?
In Rhino you can work with a mesh, that consists of points, connected with lines to form triangles and quads. When you import an STL file, you will get a mesh of triangles, and this is what you see in the screenshot.
Next to meshes, you can also work with parametric surfaces (NURBS) and subdivision surfaces (SubD). These are totally different from meshes.
Meshes do not have curvature, they consist of flat triangles and quadrilaterals. On the other hand, parametric and subdivision surfaces do have curvature.
There are several ways to work from meshes to either SubD and/or NURBS surfaces. If you’re working with Rhino 8 I can recommend the workflow from the topic linked below, which is taking a mesh, converting it with QuadRemesh to a nice quad-only mesh, then creating a SubD surface out of it.
Hi Markus and welcome to Rhino and our discourse here…
What you are struggling with has a whole field of work dedicated to it called Reverse Engineering. As Menno mentions there are MANY ways to accomplish your goals. You’ll need to do some background study on RE, and modeling in NURBs in Rhino in general before we get nitty gritty with you here. Search for ‘mesh to surface’, ‘mesh to polysurface’, ‘reverse engineering’ , ‘quad remesh’, and ‘shrink wrap’ to help you on your way.
With the things you have recommended to me, I have the impression that I have described my problem badly.
My problem is not about complex 3d structures with roundings or similar but about very simple ortogonal components that are split into triangles. i have already converted the mesh with mesh to nurbs.
mesh to nurbs is a HORRIBLE thing to do and when used is usually only a midway step before converting through other means of the aforementioned Reverse Engineering.
In your example image above, rhino currently has no GUARANTEED CLEAN way to turn that messy complicated triangular mesh panel into what you have cleanly shown on the right with the push of a button. It will be FAR faster and easier to remodel things like that in most situations.