Is there a way to force the rendering mesh of a polysurface to behave as “welded” so that it appears smooth reather than faceted?
Say that I have a column made of 8 flat sides and its a polysutface not a mesh. If it was a mesh I could “weld” it with an angle large enough to appear round or smooth. How can I do this without creating a mesh first but rather using itsown rendering mesh so that appears smooth ?
Thanks
Hi Juan,
Try ApplyEdgeSoftening in Rhino 5. This will create an edge softening object property for the polysrf to control the render mesh softening.
Hi Juan,
I see what you mean now, thanks. I think a custom angle is needed as you found. You could do it with a Grasshopper definition all at once like this by assigning multiple breps in the first component and then baking the last weld component back to Rhino. WeldMesh.gh (8.6 KB)
Hi Juan- why do you want to do this rather than make a smooth object?
-Pascal
Thanks Brian but I don’t have/use GH and it seem a rather complicated for such a simple thing.
Pascal, I use it to extrude railings which are actually pipes but I thought that simplifying the geometry from a circle to an hexagon or octagon would optimize better the rendering mesh . My railings always end up being the heaviest geometry on my model with tens of thousands of faces.
However, I just did a comparison and if I adjust the custom rendering mesh for that particular object (not the global) so that the angle is such that the mesh ends up being an hexagon, extruding a circle is actually more efficient generating only 12 triangles as long as the railing. I thought that extruding an hexagon instead would give me the same result but for some reason, even making the aspect ratio very large and the max. edge length also huge, I cannot avoid having the mesh subdivided longitudinally and having a lot of intermediate triangles… not sure why.
Anyway, I think I will simply use a circle from now on and adjust the max angle so that is creates only 6/8 faces since it seems to work better and it also looks already smooth in shaded mode.
