If quad meshes are important to you, you might have heard of the Instant Meshes and QuadriFlow open source quad meshing projects and utilities.
We have put together a simple, free plug-in for Rhino 6 that uses these two utilities.
You can find the CreateQuadMesh plug-in on Food4Rhino.
A couple of important notes:
Each of the utilities requires good, valid, closed geometry as input.
These utilities tend to be black boxes. If they don’t work, or you don’t get the results you’d hoped, there probably isn’t anything we can do about it.
If you have successes, we’d like to hear about it.
If you have failures, we’d also like to hear about it.
-Control for the output directory (eg. scratchdisk or ramdisk for fast writes)
-Automatic cleanup of the input / output files, no remnants
-Button to clear the output log
-Better formatting of the log, as it appears in the console
-Smaller intendation of the dialog text so it fits at smaller size when docked
Hi @dale, mesh on the right was built using Quadriflow, from the middle one. Btw. one more small wish, in case of exporting a Polysurface as mesh, it would be useful if there is a checkbox to export the custom rendermesh.
For quadrifllow i’m surprised and impressed by some first tests with simple meshes. I’ve had a few probs with larger ones but this could be the fault of the input, they where built from marching cubes.
In case of InstantMeshes i am used to the GUI and controlling the quad flow with strokes. I’ve not used it much as commandline tool yet.
I think you’ll find it fails more often in general when compared to the instant meshes. It’s also considerably slower. However when it works, its pretty fantastic.
yes, the speed of IM is superb, i wish it would handle naked edges better. I still have to test Quadriflow to find out how i can optimize the output. It seems it likes equilateral triangles with similar size best.
Scale of the model tends to help as well. I find that if I end up with some open ares where a mesh gets thin, scaling the model up considerably seems to help it.
The flow control feature can be rather useful in certain circumstances, compared to leaving such to the sole control of the algorithm, especially when the mesh is to be used to generate a subD.
I have been trying to find the optimum .stl settings for printing Rhino models in Jewelry. Some larger models with many bends and fillets become quite dense, making the .stl heavy (large). Reducing the size also reduces the sharpness in the details of the model. Would this plugin help? Are there better commands in Rhino 6, like “Reduce Mesh” that would be better? I’ve included the .stl settings I’m using at present. I’ve tried upping the Aspect ratio to as high as 2.0. The mesh looked cleaner but made the file lot heavier and the printed object came back dense and brittle. Burnout was problematic.
Do you really need “edge to surface” as low as 0.0004? That looks extreme. I’ve never been below 0.002 (although I’ve not drawn such small things as Jewelry).
To tell you the truth I’ve been so preoccupied learning Rhino for the last 2 years, and getting confused at what to concentrate on, that mesh and stl have been given short shrift. Haven’t been able to find many learning videos about mesh in Rhino or the meaning of the various stl settings. Thanks for replying
