Color mesh faces without gradient

[nacho_hero]

Hey, I am playing around with coloring a mesh and I really don’t like the gradient that you get on each face.

I know I can explode the mesh and color each single face mesh individually then join them back together, but this makes Rhino super slow. Similarly, I could make everything a surface and use custom preview, but this is slower than exploding the mesh.

I am guessing that I could do this in python or C#, but when I look at rhinocommon I only see ways to set the color of a mesh vertex… which would make more gradients unless I explode my mesh and I am back to where I started.

Any thoughts? Do I need to do some kind of texture mapping to get a lightweight colorful mesh without gradients?

Mesh with gradient… super smudged

Mesh without gradient… very nice

[DanielPiker]

Question about mesh coloring

There’s a couple of approaches to this over here: I think you probably could implement this logic (i.e. unweld the mesh and color its faces) with Grasshopper components. But it’s quite simple with code, in that one can implement the SetColor method directly on a face now (i.e. since Rhino 6): [2021-03-08 09_07_53-Rhinoceros 6 Commercial - Perspective] 210308_ColorMeshFaces_00.gh (9.5 KB)

[nacho_hero]

I think I got it working… I needed to flatten my exploded mesh and join it together before displaying it in rhino. I was confused because the components didn’t take long too run, but the whole interface was super slow. After flattening and only displaying the result after the join, it looks great and the interface is snappy.

[nacho_hero]

Thank you for referencing this conversation.
I didn’t know there was a CreateMonotoneMesh method.

I am going to play around with this more.

Cheers!

[nacho_hero]

Quick follow-up… using the python component with CreateMonotoneMesh was super easy and runs faster than ExplodeMesh → ColorMesh → Flatten → JoinMesh.

I am going to dig around and try to find a C# equivalent.