This will not work because there is no way for the light from the LED light at the bottom to get past the blockage caused by joining the 5 pipes. So for the reason I explain below I came up with a fairly strange approach to make the final result slightly better:
Needless to say this is totally unacceptable. There is still far too much internal material, and the total print time for the whole piece is about 34 hours.
So why did I try to do it that way? The answer is, of course, SUnion didn’t work at the early design stage. Here is a simplified example that shows the problem:
What I wanted to do was get just the outside surface of the final design and work with that - as I have done in the past, but none of these attempts worked:
Sunion
Sasquatch’s Fast Solid Union
DeBrep
Mesh Union
Trimesh
I found a very old posting here about somehow aligining seams, but the post is so old there are no images of what was aligned with what. So that was no help. So I’m posting this to see if there’s some Rhino method or GH add-on that I am unaware of that can resolve this problem.
Dfytz1 - I see your point about the mismatched ends, so I tried fixing that but it didn’t help. That makes me think that my entire approach was just wrong. The good news is that Volker’s first method - far simpler than the one I developed - does work. So I should be able to get that one incorporated into my full GH file.
The bad news is I really don’t understand (yet) why it does work, so I’ll have to spend some time figuring that out.
Thanks for showing me new things - I was quite sure there would be at least a couple of solutions that worked/
I spent some time this evening trying to figure out possible boolean operations for your case, just for fun. but is seems to be much more complicated problem then i thought initially. The problem is not only edges misalignment. I am still looking at it, maybe i will come up with something
My sentiments exactly. I started this more than a week ago and initially thought it would be fairly straightforward. I quickly found out that was not the case. After spending several hours with Volker’s solution it became clear that that one is not going to work either.
That is because for 3D printing surfaces have to have some thickness. And creating thickness for the Open Brep his method produces is quite problematic. It turns out that Offset Srf doesn’t work, nor does Cap or Scale.
I don’t normally use meshes at all, but n this case that might be the solution. Time will tell.
Well, i meant its problematic to find solid intersections to the geometry you provided initially. What problems do you have with Volker’s solution? For me it seems pretty straightforward. Plus he made version with thickness as well:
I am not using anything fancy in the c# above, its just cap brep with tolerance input. The trick is Append method - you can find Append Polysurfaces component in Pufferfish
I thought it would be nice if the concave edges were filleted but it took some extra steps to make it work for a five-fold shape using native components only and no scripts.
If it exists, could be the result of removing the base just to have the surface geometry for the example file.
