I have a few questions that I haven’t been able to resolve, and I would greatly appreciate your help with them.
Firstly, I have a mesh that appears yellow in color. While I can use quad remesh to get the mesh into a proper shape, I am struggling to make it look exactly like the second image provided. Please note that these are not bricks; they are curved panels that should fit together to form the desired geometry, with each panel having a height of 80mm. I would be very grateful for your support on this matter.
In the second step, I need to completely transform the curved panels into rectangles and assess how well I can achieve this shape.
I also tried a Python code for this, but it didn’t work properly either. You can find the necessary files in the attachment.
Geometry seems to be a spiral projected onto a conic section, then trimmed by every 3rd radius line. Also there is a technique by Daniel Piker called ‘planarization’ published here on the forum that might be relevant for you.
Thank you very much for your reply; it helped me understand the logic. The result we obtained is an average of 534 curves. How can I turn these curves into rectangles? I need each rectangle separately.Because my aim is to flatten these curved rectangles later and monitor the change in geometry.
First I would use Split Surface to divide the big surface into rings, then rectangles (so you’d unplug those two sets of lines from the Merge component and two two consecutive Split Surfaces). This should give you a Tree of sub-surfaces sorted by ring then by position along the ring. You can then use Unroll Surface to turn the curved surfaces into flat ones, and move those resulting surfaces to a grid of points with the same Tree structure.
However, Unroll Surface only works on “developable surfaces”, so that’s (basically) flat planes, cylinders, cones and combinations of parts thereof. While it looks like the original source geometry was a true cone, going from surface to mesh to surface has probably broken “developability”
I managed to divide it into segments. How can I project these segments onto a flat surface without moving them from their current position? I want to observe the change in the entire geometry.
Aargh, I should have opened Rhino before replying to your thread, sorry! I could have sworn Unroll was a vanilla component but it’s actually part of the Lunchbox plugin, which I don’t currently have installed.
However, I did see that the “master” surface that’s being Split into panels is a lovely blob shape, which is certainly not developable!
There is an unroller for quad meshes, so I’m going to have a go with that to see if it gives acceptable results.Otherwise, you might need to recreate the original cone (which will give cleaner results anyway).
Sorry to lead you on a bit. I don’t have the time to rebuild this project today, but if I did I’d do it like this:
Find the dimensions of the original cone.This would probably have to be done by hand in Rhino.
Generate circular contour lines in the Z range covered by the original shape.
Divide the circles into a set number of arc segments.
Use Weave and/or Relative Item to get adjacent pairs of arcs and use Ruled Surface to make all the panels. This ensures all the panels have nice neat parametrisation and are only Trimmed where needed.
Rotate alternate panel rings by half a panel.
Trim the panels with the edge lines as extracted from the source mesh.
Thank you for the information, I’ll try it, but for some reason I’m still having trouble cutting the net when combining the curves I obtained with the contour component with the edge curves of the cone.The curves marked in red are not working in the mesh split component.
I’m bothering you again. I’ve worked on it a bit, but there’s one point I’m not sure about. In addition to the last script you sent, how can I convert these rectangle panels into curve panels with their angles set to 90 degrees while maintaining their thicknesses?
They’re not rectangles. As portions of a cone, they unroll to segments of a ring. The corners will still be 90° but the top and bottom edges will be curved. Imagine squashing the whole thing in Z, approaching flat to demonstrate why this is the case.
But Considering this geometry, it shrinks in the z-direction, which means that even if it is small, the dimensions of the lower edge and the upper edge are different. Therefore, I think it is impossible for all four angles to be 90 degrees. It seems geometrically impossible.
It’s because you’re working on a curved surface. The rules of 2D Euclidean geometry no long apply. The classic example is a triangle drawn on a sphere, whose angles can all be 90° if drawn between the equator and poles. You can’t unroll this shape of course because the sphere is doubly curved. The cone can be unrolled though, and so can a shape drawn on it.
Think about the limiting case, a “rectangle” that goes all the way round. Imagine cutting a strip off the bottom of a cone. You get a C-shaped strip, which if you zoom in on the corners looks perfectly right angled. Your panels are all segments of a strip like this.
Hi Man, I am very grateful for your support. We made these panels flat, but can we add thickness to them while they are curved and turn them into panels? In addition to this, Can we classify the identical panels and determine how many different types there are?
