Hello Grasshopper community!
I am working on a plugin for Grasshopper that enables real-time sculpting of mesh geometry. This tool introduces a “painting” mechanism to embed multi-agent behaviors directly into the mesh, allowing intricate deformations and ornamental details to emerge interactively—without the need for external sculpting tools like ZBrush.
Painting examples:
Low res form finding example:
The halfedge mesh deformations and behaviours are computed on GPU and then converted back to a Rhino mesh. Halfedge meshes are used as the topology changes each frame/iteration. Preparing the mesh for the drawframe is the main bottleneck at this stage:
My Question:
Is there a way to introduce a custom geometry type into Rhino’s render pipeline? Ideally, I would like to bypass the conversion to the Mesh class for intermediate frames, only generating a Rhino-compatible mesh for exporting the final result. Any advice or pointers would be much appreciated!
so impressed with this work, cannot wait to see it implemented! Currently, I export from rhinoceros to blender as a OBJ file, do the sculpting with that brush, and then re-import it. It would be a lot quicker and better to be able to do it within the familiarity of the rhinoceros controls.
@jdelavaulx the sculpting features are relatively simplistic (push, pull and smooth) as this release primarily focuses on painting the “folding” multi-agent behavior. I have an older plugin titled Chameleon that creates a link to Zbrush which might streamline the process (but this plugin needs a bit of a refresh).
@MWG I tried it on a project of mine in ZBrush, but this addition to GH is fantastic! In the future, could you create a Polygroup system like in ZBrush?
Currently I just have it scaling with the force however I will add it as an extra parameter in the next update. Ideally I would map it to a keyboard control however I am fighting with rhino when listening for keyboard events (open to suggestions).
Thanks @brvdln - it looks like something is going wrong in the spatial search. Currently I have only set up GPU support for nvidia graphics cards. If you have an AMD card it is worth turning off gpu acceleration for now. I plan on adding support in the near future (currently I don’t have an amd card which makes it hard to test).
Yeah, I tested it on my work PC, which is a real dinosaur, and it’s already a miracle that it opened the file. I had to cut it (into a small portion of the sculpture) and drastically reduce the polygon count to be able to open it in Rhino. I went from about 90 million polygons to 500 thousand polygons ahahahah, and even then, I struggled to run the test. This weekend I’ll do some tests on my home PC, which is the one I use for modeling with ZBrush, much more powerful for this kind of work. Anyway, I never expected the combination of GH with ZBrush… your script would have a lot of potential if developed with other ZBrush functions
this looks really interesting! I seem to be missing the Painterly Expansion component, I’m not really a GH person at the moment, forgive me if I’m being stupid . Could you advise how to install and run? tia
. Could you advise how to install and run? tia
