If this already exists then apologies in advance.
In grasshopper there’s a component “simple mesh” (or perhaps its in a plugin) which produces a true mesh equivalent of a given polysurface. Tri surfaces (Yes, trimmed I realize) become mesh tris and surfaces (planar or not) become simple 4 sided mesh faces. I use this sometimes for exports especially to sketchup. My understanding is rhino 6 will have native support for ngon faces and I thought it would be an awesome chance to also support a simple mesh command which would convert all surfaces into an equivalent n sided mesh face. Is this reasonable? Is this something others would want? Is this even where I should post this?
Cheers and thanks for the continued work and the very public approach to development.
Hi Alexander,
I had the same need and I wrote a small script that does just that - works on both surfaces and polysurfaces.
Is this what you were looking for?
Marco
PS I use it in Rhino 5 - I haven’t tested it with the WIP
SimpleMesh.rvb (2.4 KB)
Well. It’s close. Helpful to have but I don’t think this works any different from “Simple Mesh” in GH. My wish is to do the same with n sided faces. The immediate reason is export to sketchup but I could imagine other uses too.
From left to right:
1 My input surface (which is also how I imagined the ngon mesh to look)
2 Surface made using MeshPlane & NgonulateMesh. I guess this is the same as what I want and would behave the same way but is way overtesselated.
3The closest I can imagine getting in the current ngon mesh style.
This seems less like like a tangible wish now that I’ve played with ngons more. They seem a little confused right now. Are they welded edges? It seems you can unweld them but welding edges doesn’t create them. Will they export properly? Can we hide them so our ngon faces look more ngonal?
You are right, the script is just a Rhino version of GH’s SimpleMesh. I have tried to make it work with 5-sided mesh faces but it seems it cannot be done - I think the AddMesh script command doesn’t suport ngons yet.
I have also made a couple of tests and it seems that once the Ngonulatemesh is launched, the resulting ngons are not displayed in the viewport. And in your image, I don’t see any Ngon - only quads and triangles - even if they are probably there. In the help documentation it seems they should be displayed as a single face… Am I missing something? (I’m opening a new topic on this)
you’re right there aren’t any ngons exactly but when you select a face it selects the whole face and not just one of its triangles. Also I made them with ngonulate so they must be ngons even if the display isn’t right yet.
