New to Rhino 7 and I am needing to model the EVA foam grip on a surfboard. The texture is basically raised diamond shapes, or you could think of it as diagonally cut grooves (in fact that is how it is produced)
Each diamond is about 1" by .5" and the grooves are about 1/16" deep. I am wondering if I should make a two-diamond block and then form an array.
Should I cut the grooves into a solid by modeling a bunch of parallel bars and then doing a boolean difference?
Should I just use a photo and create a decal?
How would you guys go about this? I will need to do this over and over again, and luckily the overall shape of this foam mat is a flat plane, but from the top view I will need to trim it to various shapes. I like the idea of actually having the dimensionality so the light catches it correctly for close-up renderings, but it seems like having 2000 individual little diamonds poking up out of a solid is really quite computationally intense and will eat up a lot of resources.
Thanks for any suggestions on how to approach this or what to research.
In the end I envision a large sheet of this that I can then use a lofted surface to cut through like you would with a die-cut knife (cookie-cutter) to get the right shape. Then I will need to modify the color to make renderings to match customer preferences.
Thanks a million for any guidance on doing this the “smart way”
OK well not uploading a file seems like a stupid rookie mistake in hindsight! See attached.
I was finally able to model what I wanted, but I really would like to know how someone else would go about doing this. My model was 35MB just to try to get this done because I was trying to model 48 square feet of this stuff so it was big enough to use a “cookie cutter” later
The attached file I used a round cookie cutter to grab a slice of the way I was trying to model it by subtraction (boolean subtraction) and then the way I was able to model it by building just two diamonds and arraying them, and then laying them ontop of a solid substrate.
At the end of the day I am trying to develop a system where I can quickly model these inflated paddleboards that have this texture. I have the paddleboard down pretty good, but looking for tips on how to bring this foam grip into the space. Should I use it as a block? Do I now array this “tile” I have made after I import it into my working file?
What steps can I take to make it a “lighter” model and still have the same end result.
I asked some questions in text in the two layers in the attached. Man, thanks for the help on this one!
Yes this worked. Thank you. I am not sure what the difference maker was. The cuts in the red slab were from a test Boolean difference. It worked earlier with a few bars but not with all of them…perhaps it was just too intense for the computer. I gave it 10 minutes and hit escape to end the process.
Pascal, if you were going to model that diamond shape would you make the bars and boolean difference from a solid, or would you array the diamonds ontop of a solid and Boolean union.
At the end is there difference?
So now when I loft a curve through and use it to cut a shape, I lose the edge and it is just a top surface and the bottom surface. What’s the command to put the sides back on so it appears as a solid again?
I do mostly boats and have often wondered if it would be worth modeling a non-skid surface similar to what you describe. I goofed around with the new feature in the PBR Cycles rendering/raytracing in Rhino7 hoping to use a displacement/bump map but didn't quite figure that out so tried modeling a sheet of non-skid called TreadMaster that used to be popular on metal boats. The foam versions available today are a lot more user friendly than the TreadMaster which could be like a cheese grater on knees! It came in rolls and it was customary to allow for margins around the deck and hatches and then further broken up into panels with margins in between. In the model posted I made an array of raised diamonds and then the underlayment which held them all together. That was pretty simple and then I mirrored that into a 2x2 which I Booleaned together and rounded the corners of that panel. Looked pretty good with a PBR cork material and then I tried Flow along Surface to a cylindrical panel and also to a compound panel shaped more like a deck and the results show promise. Have a look and be sure to save that .sbar material file that I used.
I just looked at the file size and it was huge so I guess it is back to the displacement map method!
I saved the file small but that only knocked the size down my a third so maybe I will be able to post here.
Too big it seems, let me try just sending the original NS panel.
Still too big or I am getting some sort of load error on the file. Maybe I can zip it!
Thanks for chiming in Jody. Yeah this is the exact stuff. I figured it out, but why is this repeating pattern such a huge file! its like 2mb per square foot. Something just doesn’t seem right.
What is the displacement map method? I’d like to learn more about that.
When I modeled it, I used two adjacent diamonds and then did an array. I wonder if what we be doing instead is to make a 2 diamond BLOCK and then array that instead. What are your thoughts?
In other news, I’m decent at geometry but have never had a reason to become good at rendering until now. Since you are doing boats, what kind of environment and lighting/camera setup are you using? My task for this weekend is to set up a template with all this stuff standardized, and create custom materials based on the foam sample chips I have. Never done any of this.
I was able to model a small section of the Surfboard foam grip- see attached.
I was able to use the wirecut command to slice this sample piece.
I need a bigger piece of this to fit my model though, so I have been using the array command 9x and 9y to get a piece larger than my model’s wirecut curve, and I run into major problems.
Even though I select the arrayed pieces the wirecut won’t work. see screenshot.
So if I use the JOIN command, Rhino get’s stuck on “creating meshes” I can’t ESC out of it and I have to restart. Any tips?
How can I have this geometry not be so huge? This single entity ends up being 178mb at the correct size. Is this just an unrealistic thing to model in Rhino?
I finally worked out how to make the grip foam pattern using an image and the bump channel. This should be lean and clean by not having to model and render every little nook and cranny. See how this looks and I will add the 3dm file with the bitmap I used. I can see now when tiling that diamond pattern that it is not seamless but I can crop it to deal with that.
Thanks for replying. Yes I think if you cropped the picture better you would get a seamless tiling.
It’s obviously tiled though due to the tonality differences in the different edges that meet up.
Certainly a lot lighter though.
I’m needing to do some close-up shots for advertising and maybe some “fly-by” movies and I really think the actual geometry is needed to sell this so they light is just right.
There must be a way to lighten this up. Maybe this nee SubD stuff??
I may try to make a BLOCK with just two diamonds and see if I can array that and perhaps it is the solution.
I’ll post a screen grab later if the kind of closeup I’m trying to do
Looks a lot better! The tiling worked great. I am just sitting down to see if I can use the block feature to help this. The fact that the foam is pretty matte helps the fact that you can’t get (I believe) reflectivity in the tiled picture that you would get if using a 3D model.
I looked at your portfolio to see some other work of yours… what kind of boat work do you do?
OK this has taken me waaay longer to figure out than I thought, but here is an acceptable result. The entire model is still under 100mb
For anyone searching this in the future or for anyone who wants to chime in with more nuanced experience, what I ended up doing is modeling just two of the diamond shapes and making them a solid. I then saved them as a block, inserted that block into my model, and then arrayed the block to get the thousands of diamonds.
Then I used the top view outline shape to use the WIRECUT command to cut the diamonds into shape. Then used the same wirecut profile to extrude a thin solid that I grouped with the diamonds.
An important note is that the wirecut seems to not work unless I explode all the diamonds first.
Perhaps exploding them negates the space savings of using a block, but whatever… I finally got a workable solution. If anyone follows this and wants to comment on tweaking the workflow I’m all ears.
