Manipulation with 3D-scanned objects

Hi forum

I'm fairly new to working in Grasshopper, so please bear with me :)

I'm currently working on a project where i am trying to manipulate with existing objects. Because of this, I have turned my attention towards Grasshopper and the many interesting things you can do with it.

I have been trying to 3D-scan objects of different kinds, and trying to input the mesh generated from these scans into Grasshopper, in order to try and create animations that could look something like the fantastic animations seen in the video below.

The thing is, that I can't work out how to get from the mesh generated from the 3D-scan into for example a Kangaroo animation process, which is why I'm asking for your help. So does anyone have any experience doing this or does anyone know how to it could be done?

I hope to hear from some of the talented minds within this forum.

Best regards

Jesper

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HI8FerKr6Q

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by martyn hogg on April 20, 2017 at 3:48pm

Usually the mesh you get from a scan will have many thousands of vertices / faces and can often have holes in it or noise so the first thing I would do is make sure you have processed the scanned mesh so it is a valid mesh. I would also try and reduce the number of mesh faces as much as possible because if you plug a huge mesh into Kangaroo you will need a supercomputer to do any kind of simulation with it.

The animations in the video you posted do not look like something Kangaroo would be the best tool for (I might be wrong) What you posted look like they are some kind of iterative, looped process that simulates growth. The Anenome plugin might do something closer to this so It's worth taking a look at that.

Kangaroo is a physics engine so you can take a mesh (or other input) and apply forces to it like inflating it or applying a load in different places to see how it would deform the mesh. I can't think how you would grow a mesh using Kangaroo in the way those shapes were growing in the video, but I might be wrong!

There has been some work done on things like leaf venation and other work trying to emulate the ideas on NervousDotCom and there are some explanations on that site about the products that they have designed and how they did it which might help you better understand what you want to do and how you might do it. You might need to learn to write code to do this sort of thing though!

Permalink Reply by Jesper on April 21, 2017 at 4:32am

Thank you very much for your reply!

Yeah I've encountered that problem..

I might be in over my head, I just figured you possibly would be able to create Differential Growth animations of some sort, generated from the input of a 3d-scanned figure, which potentially could create interesting shapes. Do you have any experience with differential growth processes? I might be naive given my lack of expertise on the subject, I found some interesting processes in the forum, that are able to simulate differential growth, which made me wonder if it is possible to insert closed meshes generated from 3d-scans into these? :)

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/video/differential-growth

Permalink Reply by Kim hauer on April 21, 2017 at 10:37am