Greetings,
I have a question I’ve been meaning to ask but that I keep setting aside thinking it cannot be done.
I am most likely being ignorant, hence I seek suggestions from the diversity of expertise/creativity here upon hitting a wall.
Long story short, I am working with protein meshes, which I slice with a plane:
We do a bunch of ‘digital fab maneuvers’ to obtain an ‘illusion armature’ made of flat cutouts:
All fine until this point.
However, the next step (and wish) is to embellish these elements with a ‘ghost’ of what otherwise would be the highly complex isosurfaces of the proteins.
First we do a random reduction of mesh vertices so the rest of the process doesn’t take forever:
Then we project (flatten) these points and keep only what falls inside the slice curve (from the section plane shown above):
From here, our current, somewhat ‘simple’ approach involves deriving a population of 2D polygons based on proximity lengths:
These polygons are intended to end up as markings or perforations on what becomes one slice of the puzzle:
Ready to laser-cut:
Sooo, the real question (please pardon me for taking this long - we thank you forever if you’ve gotten this far) is:
Do you know of a way or trick to somehow obtain a Make-2D-like ‘graphic’ of the mesh itself? Something to ‘tattoo’ the part with and that could resemble the creases or contours of the shape itself (as denoted by the red markings in the image below)?
The problem is that this single piece will take ~ 44 minutes to cut on the laser, while it’s only one slice out of 6, out of 24 parts making up the entire armature, out of 18 armatures…yup, you don’t need to do the math to determine we’ll dig our own graves in the shop waiting for all parts to finish cutting. Therefore, embellishing the parts with a bunch ‘make 2D texture lines’ coming from the shape (instead of perforations) would very significantly reduce cutting time(s).
*Edit: Although we can further reduce the amount of points/perforations, you’ll reach a point the isosurface detail(s) won’t translate anymore.
NOTE:
Those red markings are simply a result of highlighting the mesh against the points in grasshopper, somewhat of an ‘illusion’:
