Create Quad Meshes plug-in available on Food4Rhino

Those settings are currently not connected. The plug-in utilizes the render mesh as shown in the video posted above. This was part of the test harness that should be either removed or expanded from the test plug-in.

I think there is some confusion. The setting for sharp tells Quadriflow to respect a sharp edge in the remeshing algorithm so that edge stays in place. If the resulting quadmesh is then imported, the sharp edges are “welded” to say it in Rhino slang. You’ll need to use _Unweld to correct this.

_
c.

Yes, we are confused.

Hi @dale,
do you have any thoughts on this? Curves to control the mesh flow* isn’t some creamtopping for nerds – one need them to help those algorythms build an editable mesh. The remeshing results shown in the video clip are not suitable for SubD-Modeling.

*on Surface Models one could often use existing Edges as guides.


One crucial thing I forgot yesterday is symmetry support: In the case of the ornament in Brians clip one should be able to cut down the meshers work by defining a symmetry plane. The output mesh would be a lot cleaner. Diamond shaped mesh faces across the symmetry plane symmetry plane should get avoided.

4 Likes

Also from a structural engineering perspective, I would like to ask if is possible to retrieve the information from the generated mesh so it can be used withg some Finite Element codes.
So for instance i would like to know if is possible to extract information regarding coordinates of each node, the element number (each rectangle) and number of the nodes.
To illustrate i have attached an image below.

Element 1 consist of the nodes 1,2,7,6

I agree with @hifred in all the points. This plugin as it is may be usefull just to convet an organic shape like a bear without too much detail where you don’t mind if it has many polygons and control over the topology.
But to be used for industrial design or any animation program it should have more control over the flow of the polygons and number. That’s why I agree that the algorithm should have the option to be guided whith curves made by the user and the option for symmetry.

2 Likes

Same here. Mathematically those meshes are quad meshes. Practically they are still mostly useless meshes. We need to have unequivocal mesh loops where shape changes, gets defines and where we want to select in poly mode to edit the form. Like at creases, hard edges, silhouettes, etc. Building on @hifred’s example, the flow should be something like this to be useful:

Agreed, this is fast and robust and so far so good!
But without curve guides I get quads that don’t follow the topology of my model at all, so although the mesh is accurate and in other ways pretty, it’s a dead end for further construction.

The plugins only seem to work for me if the original mesh is at/near the origin? Is this a bug or normal?

And will be Quadmesh for rhino on mac ? Thank you …

1 Like

Yes, please!

@dale On the food4rhino site you said:

If we get enough positive feedback, then we’ll consider a Mac port.

Do you think it is doable in the near future, or isn’t there enough interest?

1 Like

[FEEDBACK]

  • Quad Mesh does not follow UV direction of the initial Poly Surface
  • Quad Mesh does not follow the individual surface edge direction of the initial Poly Surface
  • Does not change the size of the quad to better adapt to the curvature amount.
  • On sharped edges the vertex normal is round smooth average instead sharp edge and flat quod, splitting the edges.
  • The vertex normal must be similar to the original mesh.
  • For this reason loos in quality and not useful: is close but not good for hard surface industrial design retopology so is better to conserve the original mesh.

If you fix all that then this tool will be an excellent tool for Adobe Substance Painter, Game development, real time visualisation and rendering!
Please Rhino team, hire one person to do this.

2 Likes

Hello everyone!

We definitely agreed with everything that was mentioned in this thread about what was capable with Instant Meshes and QuadriFlow. Since then we have been working hard on introducing a new command for Rhino 7.0 WIP called QuadRemesh which takes nearly all of these things into consideration. Please try it out today.

6 Likes

CreateQuadMesh no longer appears on Food4Rhino, in favor of QuadRemesh in Rhino 7. Alas, I’m running Rhino 6 for Mac. When I purchased Rhino 6 for Windows, I discovered it is no longer usable under the Fusion virtual machine, the way previous versions of Rhino were. So I have no expectation that Rhino 7 will work with Fusion, either.

Is there any way to get CreateQuadMesh so I can use it with Rhino 6 for Mac?

Hi @tspeer,

The obsolete CreateQuadMesh plug-in only ran in Rhino 6 for Windows. The new QuadRemesh tool in the Rhino 7 WIP is far superior and is available on both Windows and Mac.

The Rhino 7 WIP comes in two forms: Windows and Mac. As an owner of Rhino 6, you can download and use the Rhino 7 WIP.

Also, Rhino 6 for Windows does run on a Mac using VMware - I do it here. We don’t recommend it, however. If you want to use Rhino for Windows on your Mac hardware, we recommend doing so using Boot Camp.

Note, I have not tried the Rhino 7 WIP for Windows on a Mac running VMWare. But I would expect it to work (too…).

– Dale

1 Like

Rhino 6 runs under Fusion on my Mac - the only problem is you can’t see the model! There is something wrong with the graphical rendering updates.

I installed Rhino 7 WIP for Mac and tried out QuadRemesh. It creates quad meshes - Yay! But I see no way to control the density of the mesh across the surface.

The guide curve capability looks interesting. I tried using two edges as guide curves in hopes of attracting more grid lines toward the edges, but that wasn’t successful.

What would really be useful is a capability that Multisurf has. It allows you to associate a table of s vs u for a curve to control the parameterization of the curve. This made it quite straightforward to control the parameterization of the surfaces created from the curves.

What I’ve noticed in Rhino is even when I turn off rebuilding of edge curves and keep the section curves exact, when I sweep a surface it doesn’t retain the parameterization of the edge curves. The isolines are irregularly spaced. This might be cured if QuadRemesh allowed, say, a master curve to be used to specify the spacing of the isolines in each direction.

Here are some examples of what I’m talking about. I created this planar surface with the kind of parameterization I want:


When I apply QuadRemesh to it, I get this:

Here’s what I mean by irregular isocurves on a swept surface:


The points along the edges show how I would have liked the isocurves to be distributed.

What would be great would be to map the parameterization of the first example to the surface in the last example.

Usually we want as few isocurves as absolutely possible, as it relates to the formulas used for the edge curves and therefore affects all later processes with the surface. And it is difficult to obtain good curvatures on too complex surfases.
But if you In example want this for visual effect you can try to rebuild the Surface to get an even distribution of isocurves and then raise the visual density for that object.
so why do you need the curve density? Maybe another approach is even better.

I am creating aerodynamic panel code models. These need to have the isocurves with a specified density across the surface. For example, when modeling a wing, one needs higher density at leading and trailing edges, and at the tip. Leading edges are highly curved, so Rhino naturally puts more isocurves there. But trailing edges have low curvature so Rhino uses widely spaced isocurves there, which is the opposite of what I need.

It is also important that adjacent surfaces share the same isocurves across their boundary, and it would be best if the density of the isocuves parallel to the boundary was also similar. Unfortunately, Rhino provides very little ability to control the density of the isocurves.

The panel code model is made up of flat panels, which is why I’m looking at higher isocurve density than you’d use for most nurbs modeling.

The density is driven not by what looks good, but by where the aerodynamic characteristics will be changing more rapidly. For example, if you had an isolated wing surface, it would need high density at both tips, but if you joined the same wing surface to another one, then it would only need low density at the joined end because the aerodynamic load would be changing smoothly from one surface to the next. So here you have the same surface but different parameterization depending on the context. You can’t get that when the parameterization is driven purely by surface geometry.

Multisurf has a Relabel command, in which a spline curve is used to control the mapping between the natural parameterization and the desired parameterization. It is simple to use and very powerful. Rhino’s Rebuild using Master Curves looks like it might provide a similar capability, but it can’t be applied to surfaces.

Why not find in food4rhino?