A while back I started playing with converting various RhinoPolyhedra meshes to SubDs, as a way of finding interesting geometry, and a way of creating nodes for pipe blends.
I made a simple definition that makes it easy to explore all the ways these polyhedra look when converted to SubD. Here it is, maybe you’ll find it fun: Polyhedra to SubD.gh (52.9 KB)
One thing that’s somewhat frustrating about this is that grasshopper’s native mesh components and many plug-in mesh components don’t play well with nGon faces. If there were more subD components, this would be less of a problem, but for now, mesh-based workarounds seem to be all we’ve got. The above definition is only possible with a python script that calls _addNgonsToMesh, and that, in turn, only works with planar ngons.
Questions:
- Are there any plugins available that will do basic manipulation of nGon meshes without breaking them into triangles? Mesh joining? Welding? Creasing?
- Are nGon meshes inherently a problem in Rhino, and if so, will we see any change to that in v7?
- Are there more SubD components on the way anytime soon? If not, what resources should I look to to learn some basic python so I can write short scripts in the python component to call whatever subD commands are currently exposed in Rhinocommon?
Some examples from the definition posted above:
Some of the self-intersecting polyhedra create plant-like results in SubD:
Some polyhedra with non-convex faces end up creating weaves as SubDs:
Any Polyhedron with only triangle and/or quad faces will play well with Weaverbird, and unlike when we use Weaverbird’s catmull clark smoothing, with SubD we can convert to nurbs for truly smooth curved surfaces:
Many of the toroidal polyhedra produce simple, almost classic modern forms when converted to SubD:
