Trouble creating bizarre surface...there must be a way!?!?!?

Hello!

I am a self taught Rhino user, so usually resolve problems as they come up with the many tutorials and threads there are available…But i have come up against a brick wall of my ability. I suspect that there is an easy way to find out and that i am just looking and thinking in the wrong direction.

I am trying to model this surface (see 1st two pics)

I have created linework of the high and low points of this surface in the hope of being able to either patch through the adjusted curves, or move the points of a surface along the linework. The latter seems the simplest and most logical solution but i am just stuck.

Here are some screen shots of the linework i have and the initial adjusted peaks. Patching through this seems to have a strange amount of noise/ inconsistencies rather than smooth curves, so maybe isn’t the solution.

I suppose the main question i have is whether it is possible to edit the points of a surface along a drawn curve? ie select a surface along the ‘peak’ lines and move up the required distance.

I would really appreciate any help anyone can give me, i understand i might be barking up the wrong tree so feel free to say so.

Thanks.

Hello - this looks a bit like Perlin noise applied as a displacement
image

-Pascal

interesting. I hadn’t heard of Perlin noise before. Some sort of displacement could work. Though i have tiled the linework so it can work over the areas required. So using an image wouldn’t quite seem to solve the problem?

Gray Scott Diffusion would get you those patterns too. Someone must’ve programmed that already for Grasshopper, look it up on google.

The look is somewhat similar to a human brain modeled years ago, but the forum images apparently didn’t survive.

The technique involved taking those curves and applying the Pipe command to them.

In this specific case, I’d export it as an OBJ mesh, bring it into a sculpting program like ZBrush and give it a simple Tools > Geometry > Deformation > Smoothing to uniformly remove harsh crease valleys.

something similar to that needed to make a brain texture sounds about right. Though a little tricky to grasp without the photos.

I did want to avoid using another program if possible.

Just to clarify…it isnt possible to edit the points on a surface along curves?

Also, whilst the Gray scott diffusion also seems like a great route, I actually need to match this to the existing reference as much as possible.

I havent used grasshopper as of yet. Any pointers in what to look for with what i should be looking out for re the programming that could work would be great.

So…perhaps key information here is that i am a Mac user. (I know). So it seems perhaps that displacement isn’t an available option for me unfortunately.

U can try to use command “PIPE” for each of the lines, and then use BooleanDifference to substract your surface with the pipe u just created. add some filletEdge command to smoothen up the cuts.

i tried with 2 random curves and you might try for the whole curve.

if the purpose is just for renderings, id rather use displacement map though.

u can export your line to vector, use corel to thicken the line and use black color with white background.
apply blur to create the smooth transition effect, then save it as Displacement map.

faster that way.

Displacement is available in the V7WIP for Mac

-Kevin