I have been drawing with Rhino for three years and have already enjoyed using this software a lot for my work. I work at a stand construction company in production preparation.
I now have a request to make eight lamps in the shape of a football, i.e. with a diameter of 1200 mm and consisting of 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons, together 32 faces.
I want to do this by milling the pentagons and hexagons on our CNC machine and then mitre cutting them on the saw.
I have already looked up some information via ChatGPT, but I can’t quite figure out the drawing.
Chat indicates that both the pentagon and the hexagon should have a rib length of 121 mm and that I should chamfer them at 20.905 degrees.
When I do this in my drawing, not all the seams come together.
To be honest, I’m not sure how to rotate the faces towards each other. Are there other commands for this besides just rotate?
As @BTH suggests, the RhinoPolyhedra plugin is the best way to start this. Select the Truncated Icosahedron and the option to create and place it at the Origin. Choose to output a surface.
Working in a Wireframe view, rotate the polyhedron so one of the hexagonal faces is at the top (this should be a simple rotation if you choose the correct view to do it in!) and extract the hexagonal face. Loft one of its edges to the edge diametrically opposed on the polyhedron (ie passing through the Origin). In the top view, polar array that to get all six sides. Copy the hexagon inwards by the thickness of your timber. Use the two hexagons and the six planes with _CreateSolid to make your first panel.
Mirror the panel to the bottom of the polyhedron. Then systematically mirror the pair to each adjacent pair of hexagons using the 3-point option to set the mirror plane to start and end of an adjacent edge and a point on the diametrically opposed edge.
Note that it helps to produce the panels on a different layer from the original polyhedron to make it easier to see what you are doing. At the end, dispose of the now unwanted polyhedron pieces.
If you need to fill the pentagons you can copy the edges of the surrounding hexagons, join and cap them.
You cand do similar things to create the framing, taking into account the profiles you need.
Yeah, you need to be a real polyhedron nerd to fully appreciate that plugin. I usually rely on the premise: the simpler the name, the more likely its what I want…
Your screenshot makes me curious but i work in rhino 7 and you made an rhino 8 file so i cant open. can you please make it a readable rhino 7 file for me?
Thanks everybody, a lot new things to learn. feel even more rookie then i was before my question but i love the rhino software. Hope i get similar reactions when i have a new question in the future, and some day i might be the one answering questions of others.
