How to triangulate this?

Rhino
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1

I have this shape I’ve made from lofting three triangles then capping it. I am also converting it to a mesh
shape.3dm (97.2 KB)
I am having trouble finding a command to triangulate it into planar surfaces; I seem to be getting some triangular surfaces, but others remain nonplanar.

lofted-tris
lofted-tris581×612 48.9 KB

What commands should I be using to do this?

Thanks!

2

For something this simple, instead of lofting it I would just build it directly out of 3 sided surfaces with the Surface from corner points tool. Or, as you want a mesh, do the same thing with the 3DFace tool and then just join the faces.

Or, just make your entire wireframe out of individual line segments like in the file below, then use MeshFromLines.

wireshape.3dm (1.7 MB)

3

Thanks!

I actually tried that before posting, several times, but wasn’t able to get them to join properly. I forget what the error was, but it was something about misaligned points.

Also… I’d like to be able to do this with larger objects where it would be too time-consuming to build each surface manually.

4

This could be easily done in Grasshopper by first converting your quads to mesh quads, triangulating them, an converting the mesh tris back to a polysurface.

5

Thanks, I’ll try it out.

6

Ok - thanks, that worked. I did it “manually” - is the purpose of using grasshopper simply to automate the steps?

Next thing I’m trying to figure out is how to turn the edges into a frame… :slight_smile:

Like hollowing it out, insetting each face, and extruding inward to create an opening. I know I saw that done somewhere but couldn’t find it again.

lofted-tris-2
lofted-tris-2738×580 69 KB

7

Yes, to apply your process to all or selected individual faces of a polysurface, instead of having to do each one individually. You can also introduce some more logic here, for instance only triangulate faces that have curvature and/or don’t subdivided faces that already are triangles, and so on.
Generally,Grasshopper is geared more towards parametrization, but it also works great for automating design processes like this.

That’s definitely a job for Grasshopper, too. :wink:

1 Like
8

Luckily, I didn’t have to select any face individually - each step was done on the whole object.

That said, I’ve experimented with Grasshopper for some other things, and really like it, so you’re right about using that as the “tool”…

cheers