Hello,
I’m having trouble trying to create a relaxed mesh which connects to openings in the room I am designing. I have created a preliminary mesh to help visualise this. I wondered if anyone could help create this relaxed mesh so it emulates a fabric connecting the openings to the balcony. Crvs signal the openings. I tried to loft the openings together but was unsuccessful in removing the intersecting mesh. I have attached the grasshopper file with a bunch of failed definitions, which I apologise for, but I’m just struggling.
You need to retopologize (remodel) your current mesh probably by hand with a neat and tidy edge flow. Doing retopology means taking a messy base mesh and “drawing” a well-planned quad mesh over it.
In Rhino, you can use the 3-D Face tool from the Mesh menu. Stick to quad faces! Makes life much easier. They should be equally sized!
It’s often times also a good idea to make organisational sketches. These can help you lay things out.
You’ve introduced so many n-gons that it makes my head spin. Using these is not a good idea, since compatibility to many other programs goes out the window.
Once you have a tidy mesh, the relaxation part will be a breeze!
I agree with @diff-arch that the best way to go here would be to systematically design a clean quad mesh.
The mesh in your first file has lots of non-manifold edges, so it can’t really be treated as a single object.
If you modelled it with extruded surfaces (nurbs not mesh) and booleans, you can remesh to triangles then relax like this.
Sometimes this is a little easier than manually designing clean quad topology.
However, while designing a proper quad mesh takes a bit more skill, in the long run it is usually better, as it gives more control, and also is easier to connect to fabrication.
Also - the shape here is necessarily far from a minimal surface - a soap film on these boundaries would just collapse to 5 separate patches. This isn’t a problem in itself, as you can use mesh edge lengths instead of soap film elements to relax it, but it does mean that the starting mesh will have a big effect on the final shape. (With a soap film you could just use LiveSoap and have it remesh during relaxation so the shape doesn’t depend on the initial mesh.)
Oh wow thank you for your help, been a mission trying to figure it out. Would it be possible to provide the rhino file for each of your previous two solutions? And is there a way to get around your Trimesh extension in Rhino 6?
There’s no Rhino file needed for either of the above files - the data is internalized, which saves the input geometry as part of the Grasshopper file.
You can do this for your own files by right clicking the parameters of referenced data and selecting Internalize data.
Here’s a version of the first one using only R6 components. tensile_exampleR6.gh (35.1 KB)
The second approach with quads is the cleaner solution though.
