Radial Symmetry with individually defined depth value Request

Hi
A request for the Upcoming [soon] Radial Symmetry: In regular Radial Symmetry there’s an axis and a defined number of symmetry points [as far as i get it from a purely user perspective] and all these points lay on the same defined plane [have same hight].
Which is all that is needed when working on a planer surface or a sphere [with the same curvature in every direction].

But on a double curvature Srf or any other more complex object. That [Planer] radial Symmetry does not work correctly.

So the request is to have an option to define the hight of each symmetry point. perhaps like this it can work…

  1. call the command
  2. select object
  3. define symmetry axis
  4. define number of symmetry points
  5. points are now visible on the same plane as the axis point
    Enter. or…:
  6. define point distance from axis [or click a location]
  7. With an option to select each symmetry point and snap it to the correct hight on the object or define an hight for it in space.
  8. Done. [Enter]

thanks a lot
akash

upcoming radial symmetry? where did you see that?

I begged for it, but I don’t think anyone said it would happen.

But two small changes to grasshopper would make it super easy to do:

  1. Make brep join work on subd objects
  2. Make geometry pipeline see subd objects.

That’d allow for radial symmetry and much much more

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Looking past the horizon perhaps…
I would have hoped this is already in development, even if in early stage? So I put that Hight-Individuality request.
as I see that limitation in other App that has the regular Radial Symmetry

Thanks
Akash

If we are talking about the same thing, it does already… verts have to be coincident but join does work on SubD now.

got it… wanted to make sure I didn’t miss something!

Maybe that’s new? I couldn’t get it to work a few months ago.

I’ll give it a shot. That would allow radial symmetry in grasshopper, as long as the user keeps the edges of the master wedge planar. Somewhat limited, but doable. The SubD Union tool @DanielPiker is working on would make it perfect.

Oh wait. I meant brep join in grasshopper, not rhino.

Is it not calling the same command?

Apparently not? A few months ago when I was trying to make smoothed versions of geometric tilings using subD and brep join, I had to convert to mesh and back.

tried it lately?

Think like a mesh…

I can see how it’s confusing since the Join command works on Breps and Meshes outside of Grasshopper but in GH they are separate and the Brep Join doesn’t work on meshes which are more closely related in this case I think to SubD.

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Joining is not sufficient, you also need a mesh weld for it to work as shown in this example:


subd-mirror-PolarArray.gh (21.8 KB)
Problem with that is that it won’t support ngons. These will be converted into triangles by the mesh weld component.

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A bunch of mesh components break nGons, and pentagon faces on subDs are common enough that this can be a problem when moving subD objects to mesh and back.

Somebody made a python script that adds ngons to meshes, but it’s just calling _addNgonsToMesh, so it won’t fix non-planar ngons.

The subDcontrolpolygon component preserves non-planar ngons. I don’t remember all the mesh components break them. I know explodemesh breaks them. I also remember that when I was writing this definition, I had to convert to breps and back because mesh components were breaking up planar ngons.

I see these issues as a good case for creating a subD join component. Either that or a lot of mesh components need to be rewritten with a “preserve nGons” boolean toggle input.

Is there separate subD join in RhinoCommon? could a python component run it?

No, it’s not exposed in RhinoCommon (yet). If McNeel gets it working like the command Join now works for SubD we basically have full radial symmetry in gh

Radial symmetry and more. SubD honeycombs. All sorts of cools stuff.

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Basically if you work in full quads (which is good habit anyway) you can already make all the cool stuff :slight_smile: or use the above method to have a live preview, then when ready bake the separate subds and join, that’s how I do it now.

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Full quads is a good habit, but braking rules is fun. Also, things like starpoints and imperfect surface continuity aren’t big deals for me, because my medium is CNC carved wood: it’s all getting sanded anyway, so small imperfections disappear.

Like, the definition I linked to is 100% pentagonal faces. If the discontinuities and edgelines that show up in my zebras are less than .005”, they’re irrelevant.

Here are some of the aggregations I could find when I played around with some of the weirder things that RhinoPolyhedra can make. The polyhedra with few faces, especially those with non-convex faces and other oddities make some interesting results when piled on eachother and converted to subD:

(and these aren’t even what I considered to be the good ones.)

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