# Isopod - implicit surface tools

**URL:** <https://discourse.mcneel.com/t/isopod-implicit-surface-tools/188951>\
**Category:** Grasshopper\
**Created:** [August 1, 2024, 3:11pm UTC](https://discourse.mcneel.com/t/isopod-implicit-surface-tools/188951 "2024-08-01T15:11:43Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 96

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**Author:** ![DanielPiker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/mcneel/user_avatar/discourse.mcneel.com/danielpiker/32/666337_2.png) [@DanielPiker](https://discourse.mcneel.com/u/DanielPiker)\
**Post date:** [August 13, 2024, 11:11am UTC](https://discourse.mcneel.com/t/isopod-implicit-surface-tools/188951/96 "2024-08-13T11:11:27Z")

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> [@martynjhogg](#):
>
> I’ve tried to use a different volume shape to trim but perhaps a component that can accept any Brep or Mesh as an input would be useful?

You can use IsoCutMesh to cut a mesh, giving open edges, and this takes any field as an input, so it can be any shape you define as a field, including an input mesh

You can also shell a surface and use Isopod boolean intersection with any other field to get a solid fitting a shape (only meshing once at the end).

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/mcneel/uploads/default/original/4X/6/a/e/6ae921c05364c1032c25160849a5f59d5047e04d.jpeg)

[trimming\_v\_shelling.gh](https://discourse.mcneel.com/uploads/short-url/wdsrVKCrIyAU1fc6CTyD2r5QqP2.gh) (249.9 KB)

What we want to avoid wherever possible is generating an isomesh from a field, then using that resulting dense mesh to define another field to be used in _another_ isomeshing component, as it will lose accuracy and be much much slower than if we can do all our operations with fields before a single isomeshing step.  
(Sometimes this field-to-mesh-to-field workflow is a useful fallback as a way of turning a non-SDF field into an SDF, but it makes things a lot heavier to process, so shouldn’t be a first choice)

For the specific case of the helicoid fields, it does look like things need to be done a little differently, as they are very non-distance like. I’ll try and make another example for these.

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