How to convert a mesh to a surface or solid

Rhino Rhino for Windows
1

Hello,
I am a newbie, and I am trying to to convert a mesh to a few surfaces or solid, instead of that I am getting an useless polysurface. As well I need an advice how to apply a surface/texture on bent surface, you can check the details in file attached.
ThanksWashing Machine.3dm (19.0 MB)

2

What does your mesh look like?
Is it smooth?

3

Thanks,
It should be, originally it was max file (there is obj and mtl version of it, as well).
I just have added the file itself.

4

There isn’t a direct way of doing this. No single command to transform the mesh into surface. There are plugins.

Whatever method you choose to do this, the resulting surface will be an approximation of your mesh.

That is as much as I can tell without more information (file, screenshot)

5

Thanks, I just have added the file itself, you can download it now (link is in my first post).
Is there a way to convert max meshes to surfaces, can 3ds Max manage this? The most of 3D models today are in .max format, unfortunately.

6

Hello - with this object it will not be too hard to create surfaces, but in general it is not a matter of converting but recreating mesh objects as surfaces. Did you start from curves in Max? If so, probably the same curves will be useful in Rhino.

-Pascal

7

I am a novice, I have some experience with Rhino, none with Max. I picked at it, made some conversions, but all I managed to do are messy polysurfaces. I couldn’t find any video tutorial on subject “how to convert max mesh to surfaces” - I suppose it is not possible to do it automatically at all.

1 Like
8

Reverse engeneering is a big topic. There are no easy ways to do this.
What might help is the _MeshtoNurb command. Each polygon will be converted to a nurbs surface. Attantion: This is a good way to pump up a 3MB STL to a 150MB and you cannot really modify the result! So big data.

9

Your model looks simple enough to model fairly easily so maybe converting your mesh to individual nurbs surfaces and strategically snapping lines to the ends will work in this case. On more complex free form mesh models I have run Contour through the mesh, lofted the resulting curves to get a quick start, then fine tuned details by editing the control points.

10

@s.alt
Using MeshtoNurb in this way is generally a very bad idea.
Here’s a great paper that clears up what this tool is good for and what it NOT good for:
https://wiki.mcneel.com/rhino/meshtonurb

1 Like