Minimal Surface Form

[user637]

Hello, I’m working on a project that utilizes an organic form and I’m having trouble pinpointing the correct tools to get the right result. I have looked at hours of videos on minimal surface generation on kangaroo but they’re always a bridging connection between curves or a surface. So I then looked into mesh relaxation as a way to make a rougher subd model into a minimal surface but it didn’t have the same adaptability as if it was modeled solely as a minimal surface in grasshopper.
Form Studies.pdf (596.0 KB)
The issue with the mesh relation is that I can’t control the tension in the larger forms which became too bubbled compared to the sectional quality I desire.

So I’m asking to see if there is a way to create minimal surfaces with some kind of form restraints to create larger areas between the bridging.

Or if there is another way to approach this that I don’t know of rather than minimal surfaces or mesh relaxtion. Thank you!

[DanielPiker]

Hi @user637

If you mean like the ridges like in your second image - you can relax meshes with rows of internal vertices kept fixed in Kangaroo - the anchors don’t have to be on the boundary.

It sounds though that maybe you are looking for a general way to sculpt and control the shape directly rather than form-find tensile or minimal surfaces specifically.
In this case you might be better off modelling more manually in SubD.
If you make a very coarse base shape with a few quads, you can move a small number of control points around to get smooth shapes, and where you want ridges you can select and Crease some edges.