Refine a mesh

Hi everyone, is there any method on Grasshopper to refine the mesh and export it to STL? Was it advisable to use the Pancake plug-in to export the mesh and Waverbird to refine it?
Below I report the mesh of the cellular structure.Mesh_affinata.PNG

1 Like

You can use Pancake to export STL.

But the mesh looks already very complicated so that it may cause issues if you want to 3d-print. When possible, please upload the file so that we can give you more specific advice on refining.

Senzatitolo.gh (12.0 KB)

Have you looked at the Cocoon plugin and the Dendro plugin?

If you use these to generate a mesh around your initial line network you will get a mesh that is perfect for 3d printing.

This would be better than trying to clean that mesh up in my opinion.

1 Like

Tips for using the Dendro plug-in with the mash function to generate the mesh?

TIPS : Search for Dendro on this forum, you will find a lot of examples.

If Rhino 7 is available, your best bet is probably to use MultiPipein SubD.

4 Likes

Is Fatten updated to the same better functionality as Multipipe in Rhino? Or is it just renamed?

The MultiPipe now in GH in the 7.2 release candidate is a new version - with better handling of high valence nodes and several new options. Thereā€™s an example file here.

4 Likes

Cool. Looking at HSKimā€™s screencap I can already see youā€™ve replaced spheres with node size. Looking forward to playing with it.

Now it should be more capable of working on things like lattice structures with lots of connections into one node, where the previous versions would struggle to keep a good shape.
(https://vimeo.com/489491787) (https://vimeo.com/489505758)

For something like the structure in this thread though, youā€™d still want to clean up the input line network more first. Just using Voronoi3d on points generated by Grasshopperā€™s Populate3d gives a line network with many extremely short lines and small angles, which would lead to overlapping pipes. Isosurfacing such as Dendro is one way to solve this, but gives a dense unstructured mesh as output.
If you want a volumetric lattice structure that can be turned into clean pipes with simple mesh/subd structure I think it would be better to control the initial point distribution more to get better lengths and angles.

Now I try with the Multipipe. is it possible to export the file later in STL format?

  1. Choose SubD object generated fr MultiPipe.
  2. Fileā€“>Export Selected
    3 Choose ā€œSTLā€ file format in the dropdown menu.

Iā€™m not sure this line geometry as it is is currently suitable for MultiPipe.
There are a lot of areas like this


where the lines are so short and/or close together, thereā€™s no sensible way to make nodes connected by pipes, unless they merge into one another.

Which is why I say the options would be either

  1. Use Dendro or similar to make an isosurface which allows this merging
  2. Clean up the line geometry to collapse short segments and remove tiny angles. This might be possible with the Topologizer component as @HS_Kim shows, but I think the tolerance setting for this would probably need to be larger than the NodeSize you are using for the MultiPipe.

or ideally-

  1. Generate the line geometry differently in such a way that these tiny segments and angles do not appear in the first place.
2 Likes

Thank you.
The Multipipe function can I find it inside the Kangaroo plug-in?

No, it is under the Surface>SubD tab, (and only if you have your update frequency set to Release Candidate and have downloaded the latest version of Rhino 7)

about optimizing the distribution, one way would be something like this:
tetrahedral_lattice.gh (15.3 KB)

It packs spheres into the volume, then takes the Delaunay tetrahedralization of their centres (using the MeshEdit plugin). This way you avoid the short segments and small angles you get from the Voronoi of non optimised points.

3 Likes

What is the function of the ā€˜KinkAngleā€™ command using the Multipipe component? Should the angle be entered in radians? Thanks.

This algorithm is very interesting and fulfills my requests for mesh improvement very much. I was wondering if it was possible to orient some branches (uprights) of the foam, so as not to require additive printing supports.