Ultimately I want to be able to convert curved surfaces into flat planes and to unroll these flat planes so that I can plasma cut and weld the object in real life.
The way I know how to do this is by converting a NURBs object into a mesh. Then either “squish” it as a mesh or convert it back into a NURBs and “UnrollSrf” as seen in the short video I created for this post.
One of the problems I am having is once I convert the NURBs to mesh I have a superfluous amount of triangles on the top end of the cylinder. I want the top to be a polygon not a disjointed collection of triangles.
Hi Joseph - if the object is made up of developable surfaces, like a cylinder, use UnrollSrf directly on the pre-mesh object - leave the meshing part out. Does that do what you need?
I only used a cylinder to illustrate a point. I want to scale this concept to complex models where I can take something like an organic model of a horse, convert it to flat planes (mesh), plasma cut those flat planes, and weld them together into a physical object.
In other words I need to unroll an object made up of flat planes.
Here are some more images illustrating what I want to do…
What you are missing is an option like known from the MoI3D meshing options (access per ini file only).
There you find CentroidTriangulation=y. I use it enabled always. Could be nice to get it for Rhino too.
No, not at Rhino yet, it was an example from the little brother of Rhino to second your request. I mean, we need this option for Rhino too and I would like to see it too.
If you need this kind of meshes for a project only than you could use the MoI3D demo.
At Rhino - check the options at the lower end - is simple planes disabled? And the minimum initial grid quads 8 helped here.
At MoI3D - save as OBJ -> meshing UI will be opened. If your top surfaces doesn’t show the radial pattern than close MoI3D and open the ini file at the installation directory. Under meshing there should be the option CentroidTriangulation=y. Set it y (yes) …
