How would you model this kind of shape?

mottergabriele · June 18, 2019, 4:34pm

Hey guys! I came across grasshopper only recently, I’m studying it and I’m loving it! Though, I was wondering how you would model shapes like the E-Volved Table by Timothy Schreiber.

My final goal is to learn how to model my own products but since I’m new to grasshopper I don’t know where to start.

Thanks for the patience!

Rickson · June 18, 2019, 4:38pm

Fairly advanced but do a search for Dendro on the forum.

mottergabriele · June 18, 2019, 4:46pm

I’m aware that is advaced modeling, but I don’t give up! Thank you for the hint!

DanielPiker · June 18, 2019, 5:00pm

It might not be as hard as you think.
The skeleton fattener takes some curves as input and thickens them into a quad mesh, with spheres to set the radius at each node.
In Rhino you can then use ToSubD to convert this quad mesh to a smooth subd object
skeletal_table.gh (283.8 KB)

mottergabriele · June 18, 2019, 5:08pm

That’s exactly what I wanted! Thank you so much, I’ll check it out right the way!

mottergabriele · June 18, 2019, 5:11pm

I’m having problem in install it, can you give me a quick hint please?

DanielPiker · June 18, 2019, 5:14pm

Unblock the file, then put it in the folder you get to from the Grasshopper menu File>Special Folders>Components Folder. Then close and restart Rhino.

mottergabriele · June 18, 2019, 5:17pm

Worked, thank you so much!

cdyl.darrellchan · June 19, 2019, 4:46am

Saved

l11 · August 24, 2020, 2:52am

Daniel,
This is awesome. Thank you so much. I also checked out your kangaroo model in the skeleton fattener thread. In those, spheres are loaded in as surface in Grasshopper while spheres for this table leg are Brep. Are there difference?

Also, I placed spheres in Rhino. Then placed in Grasshopper as surface. It’s really cool that I can change scale of spheres in Rhino to affect the grasshopper geometry. However, it wasn’t easy to change scale of several spheres at different locations. Is there a way to easily change scale of multiple spheres in grasshopper without changing each one’s origin point?

I just started learning Grasshopper. Sorry if my questions are too dumb. If you happen to know something I can read up or watch, you could please just direct me to those instead of spending your time to explain to me.

Max3 · August 24, 2020, 5:10am

Spheres can be surfaces or breps. A sphere is a single surface. Grasshopper accepts single surfaces as breps.
Yes, you can scale multiple spheres at the same time in grasshopper, easily. If you watch any beginner grasshopper tutorials this is the sort of thing that you will learn on day one, within the first hour. Tutorials are your friend. Watch as many as you can, and look for the beginner one’s first. That’s how most of us learned.

The simplest form of scaling multiple spheres in grasshopper looks like this: