I know how to create a lattice structure within a volume defined by two curved surfaces, but I’d like the resulting lattice to have consistent sized cells/voxels…
How would you approach this?
→ Regular lattices create geometries that are not perpendicular to the surface normal (thus failing to give proper structural strength IMHO)
→ Conformal lattices create big density differences within a piece, resulting in thicker areas having larger cells.
Here a visualisation of what I’m trying to achieve:
Ah I see, so you need a volumetric mesh.
For generating a hexahedral (each cell is like a distorted cube) mesh I’m not sure there is anything free and integrated into Grasshopper, but there are certainly many engineering tools which can generate this type of mesh.
Tetrahedral meshes are easier, as you can just distribute some points then get the Delaunay. I don’t think Intralattice or Crystallon work with tetrahedral meshes though, so you’d need to do the thickening up yourself.
Thank you very much!
that’s the concept/name I was looking for.
I’ll search for ways to create a “hexahedral mesh” first, and edit/thicken it to create the lattice.
You haven’t specifically mentioned what’s your use case or if you actually need a hexahedral mesh.
Hexahedral meshes are awesome because when they’re properly built they provide such a regular shape and means of connecting adjacent cells. It would seem plausible to use a twisted box method to fill a volume with a repeating pattern. Though making a nice hexa mesh from a generic volume is quite difficult…
Here’s something I was able to get quite quickly out of that Tetgen interface:
Just from intuition, if you’re looking at creating a very stiff and material efficient structure, tetrahedral is probably better than hexahedral. The hexahedral structures look really vulnerable in their shear plane and probably behave in a very anisotropic fashion where as a large enough tetrahedral mesh might be fairly isotropic (? just a guess here).
Have a look at FEA/FEM tools such as OpenFoam, Salome Meca, Code-Aster for some existing volumetric meshing tools.
Hello Michael, thank you for sharing this nice work I am new on the grasshopper, so if you don’t mind, can you share this grasshopper screen shot or gh file? @Michael_Pryor
