What components would you use to achieve such a texture?

Hello All!

I’ve been trying to learn rhino/grasshopper for about a month now and im currently challenging myself to achieve such a texture. I am not looking for a tutorial but more of a guide on what components i need to use to achieve something like this. I want to try to figure it out on my own but ive spent the last week with no results. I managed to do it with simple lofted objects but im guessing the example attached is not doing that because of how perfect the spheres look.

Hi!
Welcom to this forum!
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What you achieved so far?

Hey! Sorry i didnt see that!

So what i have so far is basically a definition that lets me take any curve and create a saw-tooth shape out of it and then i can take those curves and create a loft. But now how can i do this with spheres coming out of the shape (im assuming its a brep, please correct me if im wrong but this whole brep/surface thing is still confusing to me)

That is an interesting shape for sure. I’ve 3D printed a number of shapes sort of like that, so I have an idea about how to make it. But there is one point that would require a special technique I don’t know how to do. Here are the steps I’d take:

  1. Make a circular array of large solid rectangles. the thickness of which is the thickness of the fins you want to end up with.
  2. Make a cylinder that forms the inside shape and thicken it so it has sides, a bottom, but no top. (I do this with Cap and SDiff.)
  3. Make a hex grid and map it on to the surface of the cylinder. (Your “spheres” are actually puffed out hexagons.)
  4. Using some technique I don’t know but that has been mentioned here a few times, puff out the hexagons so they look like the ones in your image.
  5. Use Join (or MJoin because I think the puffing results in a mesh, not a Brep) to combine #2 & #4 into a single object.
  6. Use Sint to make the intersection of #1 and #5.
    Perhaps someone here can clarify how to do the puffing. As I said, I think it involves meshes which are something I have little experience with.

Just use cylinder+spheres as base shape and then contour or else over it…
2020-08-28 18_29_28-Window


This is just one way to do a similar shape.


sphere vase_V1.gh (22.3 KB)
This is just doing vertical sections and lofting through them, more or less…

Another way would be to actually trim the base shape and scale XY the pieces to maintain the original spherical surfaces (better looking reflections/shadows).

A final detail would be to add fillets to all the corners, but it’s safer to do that on rhino… or, leave it to the 3D printing, it will smooth the sharp corners anyway.

Maybe you wanted the teeth to have a semi-circular section?

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Most excellent - thanks. I was stuck on the concept of a hex grid rather than actual spheres because I’ve used hex grids a fair amount. It is interesting (to me) that the spheres result in hex shapes, but should have been obvious since regular tiling can only be hexagons, triangles, or squares.

Lately I’ve been working on shapes that look nice but that can’t be 3D printed, so I’m looking forward to making use of your method to produce something printable.

Hey this is AMAZING! Thank you so much for taking the effort I will have a look at it now but from what i am seeing its pretty identical!

Here’s my initial result using 200 ribs. It needs a bit more tweaking before it’s ready for printing.

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Hey would it be possible to do this for a custom geometry and then apply the texture to it? Instead of building the geometry out of GH for more control. Thanks!

This geometry is not a texture; it is the result of creating a basic shape with bumps and then intersecting it with a polar array of fins or ribs. Here’s an example:


For this I used a simple cylindrical shape as the base, added the spherical bumps, and then did an intersection with a bunch of radiating fins.

Here’s another one I haven’t printed yet (awaiting a new printer) for which I used a slightly different GH script, but with the same basic concept:

I don’t know if this technique would work with a piece of “custom geometry”, but it might.