Hello!
When opening my old files to do tests in Rhino 8, I came across this project:
I was asked to create the masses of the buildings of an entire city.
These buildings were 3D printed using stereolithography, the image below represents several 3D printing plates. In total, it took 8 plates of 750mm by 650mm to print all the buildings.
Once unfolded on the map, the elements at 1/500 scale covered an area of 12m².
A number of buildings, particularly on the edge of the model, were made with simple flat-cut plexiglass plates, and other buildings were made in a more traditional and much more detailed way.
There were a lot of buildings!
The client provided me with a 3D file probably from OpenStreetMap or similar.
This allowed me to indicate the roads and building heights, but for the roofs, I had to interpret them from Google Maps and Street View.
Despite this, the most time-consuming part was creating the thickness pull on the volumes.
It was necessary to print the buildings in sets and to have reinforcement blades to prevent the volumes from collapsing.
Automatic solutions provided by dedicated software such as Magic were therefore not possible.
From a modeling perspective, it’s just rectangular boxes with roof slopes, and when doing this kind of work, you only use about ten functions: Rectangle, Box, MoveFace, Split, etc…
What I find particularly interesting to share with you is that for this project, I was talking to Rhino to execute the commands. I would say out loud “box” and it would launch the box command. Yes, yes, I was talking to Rhino.
The Microsoft and RhinoCommon libraries being very comprehensive and well-documented, and especially the valuable help obtained on this forum, allowed me to have a functional plugin in two days. I even found here the help that Dale provided me at that time.
It took me a total of 4 weeks to model the 8 plates, and for many years I have been experimenting with solutions to improve my workflow in Rhino. This plugin is probably the one that has saved me the most time, unfortunately it is not well received in Open Spaces…
jmv