Create a surface between two curves

Rhino
1

I have a tracing of a lightbulb that I would like to create a surface between the lines so that it can be further extruded and eventually exported as an .stl file.

So far I have not found a way to do this in the forums.

My idea is some function that would create a surface based on two (more or less) parallel curves.

shans lightbulb only curves.3dm (1.0 MB)

2

Sweep 2 rail? You’ll need to draw another curve connecting the start ends of your two curves. It can be a straight line or any other curve you want. Use it as the shape curve and your two originals as the rails. Does it give you what you want?

3

Thanks for that info AIW!

Looks like the sweep functions have changed names, but I was able to find several from the clue you provided.

Turns out that the subdsweep2 and subdsweep1 functions seems to be the two to look into for this particular kind of structure.

The subdsweep2 got confused and could not find a proper solution but the subdsweep1 worked pretty well as you can see by my latest upload. I just chose drew a line for the “sweep shape” in the prompts and it did pretty much what I was after.

Then I was able to create the subd surfaces I needed and extrude them. Although they look a little rough. Especially in the perspective view. For some reason, the extrusion went positive for some of the surfaces and negative for others.

And it turned out kind of “spiky”. This can plainly be seen in the perspective view. I executed the extrudesubd function on the surfaces and only put in 5 as the extrusion distance, and it turned out this way.

I wonder if there is some kind of smoothing function to make this more uniform and also what I could do differently in the extrude to perhaps help.

shans lightbulb only curves v2.3dm (13.6 MB)

4

With a bit of cleanup, you can create a boundary surface (_PlanarSrf) with the curves in file of your first post and then extrude with the gumball or _ExtrudeSrf and the result will be two closed polysurfaces.

Here’s how it looks without a cleanup:

image
image1690×1312 177 KB

shans lightbulb extrusion.3dm (17.2 MB)

5

Martin,

Wow that worked a lot better than the subd functions.

Thanks for the help!

I was able to start over from the curves and get what you show here.