Evolver for minimal surface! any ideas and helps!

hi all,
i followed the post of https://grasshopper3d.ning.com/forum/topics/minimal-surfaces?id=298... and found that there mentioned rhinomembrane and evolver, for rhinomembrane is not free and i don't know how long will be the demo, so i want to try my luck with evolver, but after i have installed it, i found that it should use OpenGL/GLUT to open, but it's of C++??, i read that it should be opened under the folder of win32, but i didn't find the win32 under the folder of Windows:(anyone could suggest me how to start the Evolver that could creat the minimal surface?

thanks in advance

wei

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Jon Mirtschin on November 12, 2009 at 12:09am

Hi Wei, I was involved in helping a couple of Grasshopper users in setting up and running the minimal surface solver in my structural plug-ins. You can see a slightly different mesh relaxation in my recent blog post on the British Museum Great Court Roof (http://geometrygym.blogspot.com )

I'm still trying to find some spare time to add dynamic relaxation to the tool set. How quickly do you need to do this? The current solver can produce slightly better results than shown in the posts here on the newsgroup, I have advanced it so that you can resize the mesh as it runs, and also run a vertex repeller so that if mesh faces start to collapse or elongate, you can recreate the mesh. So it can produce much better results.

There's a blog entry I can add on using the existing tool to search for Costa's minimal surface (starting from a grasshopper basis for defining the constraint edge arrangement and size). I've been holding off until I could test it with a dynamic relaxation solver, but I'm happy to do a progress post on it with the current solver if it's of interest.

Cheers,

Jon

Permalink Reply by yewei on November 12, 2009 at 9:56am

hi Jon,
in fact i noticed already your newf plug-in,and its nice feedbacks from other users, but i am that blunt that i hope your software won't be that beyond my capability, now i search to try it!!and i will let you know, and look forward to your progress post with the costa's minimal surface!

and i found the plug-in Math for rhino3, but quite little information for this plug-in and is limited to Rhino 3.

best regards and many thanks!

wei

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