I am trying to modify a collection of surfaces to smooth out bumps.
I’ve found that intersecting the surface with a series of parallel planes to make contour lines helps visualize the smoothness of the surface.
I’d like to make a new surface from the modified contours, but can’t find a good technique in Rhino or Grasshopper. Patch doesn’t give a consistent result delaunay mesh in grashopped doesn’t either. I may be missing something - any ideas?
contours.3dm (790.6 KB)
Dale,
Thank you - Zebra is useful for analyzing.
I think the tool I’m really looking for, though, is a way to edit the patch surface to get it more smooth. IE if I can edit the contour lines and then rebuild the surface using them, then I can get a lot of control over the outcome. But I can’t find a process for that.
Smooth and organic can be achieved with SubD.
Dear @alec.burney
maybe post more then one surface, so it is more clear what s the common feature of all those surfaces form your collection.
what are you gonna do with those surfaces ?
visualisation/rendering, production, …
I don t believe that contouring a surface is a nice approach to optimise a surface - it does not represent the later structure of your surface, so there are no powerful tools to use those curves as input. I would try to build proper input curves and give _sweep2 a chance.
a curve setup similar to this… just a fast
_line _project _rebuild _sweep2
Tom,
Thank you. I think that this workflow is looking good, I will explore that some. Here’s a new file with more than one surface. They are for production, CNC milling.
Martin,
I’ll explore subd some. My worry was that the number of subdivisions needed to get a smooth multiple-curved surface would be too many to allow for adjustment.
contours2.3dm (1.7 MB)
True, but with a limitation which can be signficant for some shapes, such as these. SubD surfaces always have zero curvature normal to edges and creases. These shapes have tight curvature at the edges. Changing the shapes to ones with zero curvature normal to the edges may or may not be within the design intent.
@alec.burney The shapes are trimmed surfaces with very large numbers of control points. Smoothing the surface while maintaining the general shape and edges would be very tedious if possible due to the number of control points.
It would probably be more efficient to rebuild the shapes using a different approach, such as Sweep2 with a pair of edge curves and a few defining cross section curves, with the curves defined using as few control points as possible. Surfaces made using curves with fewer control points are inherently smooth and easier to modify.
