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 Brian,
Thanks for the suggestion but it is not good enough for what I need. See attached. The top one is the polysurface converted to mesh and welded at 89 deg. The bottom is the polysurface with only edge softening to the max.
That is too bad …
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.
