Single curved surfaces, also known as developable surfaces, are extremely important to modelling in various fields like marine design, architecture, product design, and art works. They help reduce manufacturing costs and tooling, yet no other software allowed designers to use them in a straightforward way with a high degree of precision and control.
Things changed! EvoluteTools D.LOFT enables users to create developable surfaces between arbitrary 3d curves with a push of a button, hassle free.
A quick introduction video is available on Evolute’s YouTube and YouKu channels.
I would be very interested to see how the Evolute D.lofts compare to Rhino Lofts with the straight option.
Does anybody know how they compare and what D.Loft is doing with the input curves to produce the surfaces?
Hi Willem,
the “straight” option produces nothing else than a “normal” loft between adjacent pairs of crvs, but afaik has nothing to do with developable surfaces. You can test that. D.loft does nothing to the input curves, they stay the same, but the resulting surface is optimized in the background for developability, you can read some papers from the Evolute website to get to know more what happens in the background.
Cheers,
Florin
Thanks for the clarification. I have also inquired via email and I got 2 example files in reply from your support team (Alexander Schiftner). Both files he send were worth more than a 1000 words.
May I suggest to put some example files on your website, and/or post them here. In my opinion having, your hands on the actual geometry that D.loft produces is essential for selling it. I’m no mathematician, but a practical user of Rhino, seeing the resulting surfaces in 3D and unrolled is the only way for me to have a feeling for the “quality” of D.Loft.
By looking at the demo I’m sure it is fantastic add-on but one thing keeps me surprised.
150 MB unzipped folder for a one command? It’s a half of my whole Rhino folder in Program Files before cleaning and equal after. Grasshopper installer is 8MB only.
Running on SSD discs I’m very aware of a space usage. Actually, it’s kind of obsession where I delete everything less than necessary.
Dear Piotr,
many thanks for your feedback. The size is explained by the following facts:
both 64bit and 32bit versions are included, each taking about 50% of the space
we make use of the highly optimized Intel Math Kernel Library, which includes processor-specific optimizations. You may delete dlls which are not specific to your processor, but please make sure to test whether you deleted too much before finally deleting the dlls.
Thanks for the explanation, I appreciate your effort and I will definitely
put it to the test.
What I am trying to avoid is a software that does nothing and takes 200 MB
of a disc space.
Example: I bought a computer mouse and it’s driver was about 250 MB after
installation (more than a whole Rhino). It’s ended up with returning mouse
to the shop.
I’m sure there are more guys like me.
