I hope you’re doing well. This might be a foolish question, but I have a question about my project. I’m trying to design a lamp using Grasshopper, and it starts with a polygon instead of a circle. However, I’m facing some challenges with the modeling process. I would like to know how to create the protrusions on the piece or how I could achieve that with Grasshopper. I’m very new to the program and don’t understand much, but I’m excited to learn!
If anyone has experience or insights on this topic, I would greatly appreciate your help. Thank you in advance!
Honestly? As loathe as I am to say this? YouTube search “Grasshopper Vase”. Because the most common beginner project for which there is a tutorial (literally hundreds) is a vase.
For several years now I’ve been using GH for vase and lamp designs that I 3D print. Generally I use one of two basic methods for this: either a Loft shape made from a series of vertically stacked closed planar curves, or a sweep surface made from a single vertical polyline or Interpolated curve.
Here are 4 examples that are similar, but simpler, than the shapes you showed:
All of these are made from GH files - only use Rhino for creating STL files. Also, I never use Vase mode for 3D printing because the resulting single loop surface results in a print that I think is just too fragile for the real world.
The shapes you showed are a bit more complex than the one’s I’ve made - So far I haven’t figured out what the best approach would be to make them.
The steps you noted are exactly the steps I’ve used for quite a while- thanks for your much more precise clarification. I’ve not tried lamp shades per se, but have done many stand-alone desk/table lamps lighted by small LED puck lights. My top-left pic shows 2 of my smaller ones.
For prints like these that have to be handled I found that a thickness of around 3mm allows plenty of light to shine through and also provides a shape with sufficient rigidity to enable safe handling (and falls to a hard floor.). I did discover that whether to use scaling or offset depends a lot on the overall shape of the design, but I reckon this is not new news for anyone.
You mention using GraphMapper in step 4, which I have done several times. But many times I found it was better to manually scale the control curves because it was easier to get the final shape I wanted, and could do so with fewer control curves too.
I remember reading a post by David Rutten years ago in which he said he wrote GraphMapper but never really liked how it worked, and he was aware that others didn’t like it much either. I guess that sort of just stuck with me.
Instead of scaling polygons, they can be created at different heights with various sizes using radius values passed through a graph mapper. The OP’s images show sections that are not simple polygons…
Here’s a starting point…
You can also split the base polygon to make it a star as an extra step 1b. Lodted_Wavy_Poly.gh (13.6 KB)
It’s doing something weird though that needs some attention. creates a bad mesh when exported to STL.
Also, creating the wavy effect could be done in a better way, I’m sure
Its quite slow when dividing the polygon profiles into 100 points to create the wavy pattern but interesting when you reduce the amount of points and profiles…
I guess we all have our favorites - I typically use a sine curve, but occasionally a Bezier too.
I was most impressed with your GH file, and although I don’t much like the final shape it produces I really like the method you used to produce it. I tweaked it a fair amount to make it suitable for vases:
My GH file is at the bottom in case anyone wants to try a vase shape too. If course it’s fine to use the Loft surface alone for a spiral vase-mode print. (Those print a lot faster )
On my system the final Closed Brep calculates in 686 ms and displays almost instantly. Generating the STL file takes only a few seconds. The STL imported into the Orca slicer - which is based on the Bambu slicer - with no errors and looks like this before slicing:
The estimated print time for this is a bit over 28 hours, primarily due to all the short moves the printer has to make due to all the ripples. One way I"ve used to speed this up is to make the inside surface smooth - by using non-ripply Intcrvs, so I’ll probably make another change to enable doing that. Lofted_Wavy_Poly-bb1.gh (27.7 KB)
I think it might be best to do the rotation before applying the ripple. You could create a smooth inner offset from the smooth curves then apply the ripple and loft the outer surface.
Nice to see the vase version!
This might be a nice Shapediver project for people to generate their own STL files for 3d printing.
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