I model many things that require symmetry. Currently, I have to build one side and manually mirror it over. Often I do this in stages, mirroring sections as I go along. This is ok, but often, history may not be enabled and not rigoroulsy monitored, I also use the 'Symmetry tool, but it’s not quite the same?
I can see the need for an mirrored modeling toolset that display a mirrored preview across a line of symmetry. Perhaps this could be a preview, that you can ‘bake’ when ready.
Yes thanks. I use both these approaches but I think mirrored modelling should just have a simpler approach. It could be a check box, for example which toggles mirroring on and off. This could be in the panel area and give the option of which plane to mirror around.
I’ve seen this done simply with the render mesh- the actual geometry does not mirror, but the rendermesh does giving you a good representation of the whole-
Hi, a long time Autodesk Alias user who switched over to Rhino here. I really liked the approach to symmetric modelling in Alias. There are a few other tools to help but the main thing is that you can set individual layers as symmetric and define the symmetry axis for that layer. Anything you throw into that layer will be mirrored. The nice thing then is that you can match objects with their mirrored selves to ensure continuity across symmetry axis (with history).
I find this solution simple and elegant. Is it something that can be considered for the next Rhino release?
Grasshopper preview unfortunately cannot be used for surface analysis (Zebra analysis etc.) natively. As such, I find the preview to be lacking in quality compared to the way actual geometry is rendered and handled. Mirroring layers is the most dynamic way to approach this and would be very welcome.
Hi - So I made the suggested grasshopper test from TOMI.
I works really good, I even can Filter it to a specific Layername (I called my Layer “Sym” )
Shading is a little off, but that still quite usefull!
Only frustrating thing is the performance… It gets really unusable if you have a lot of geometry on that Layer…
This could be really usful- when I dont have to Mirror the real geometry - but only the light rendermesh!
So a combination of Grasshopper and the Workflow that Kyle mentioned could be a solution.
Does anyone know if the rendermesh can be accessed via grasshopper or rhinocommon?
Is anyone from McNeel even reading this?
There is really many examples of easy fixes and smaller improvements like in this thread- throughout the forums, but there seems to be no reactions at all…
Hi Jimmy -
I added this thread to feature request RH-1624 (not visible to the public).
It looks like this wish was first added to the list on 2004-04-08 and is also recorded as RH-7374, RH-2092, and RH-26905. I see that this last one is currently scheduled for 8.x but that is probably unrealistic given the amount of work that still has to be done to get Metal to work as it should.
-wim
This functionality is actual pretty banal to rebuild in Grasshopper…
It does nothing but mirroring the Geometry on the xz Plane, (for optimal performance better use the Rendermesh) you dont need access to that mirrored Geometry, its only a visual representation of the content of a tagged Layer (in my case *_Sym named)
The geometry pipeline component actually has all the functionality you need- (layer filtering!)
This is quite a good prototype of what a proper RhinoTool / Layer Option should do!
Not sure if this is good forum etiquette but I’d like to add my +1 to this feature request; modelling using a mirror or set of mirrors (like if working on a quarter of an object) is quite common and it feels like the sort of feature that Rhino would have had from day 1
