Exoskeleton "Voronoi" structure

I'm trying to make a 3D voronoi exoskeleton structure (don't judge my cliche exercise). Many people using exoskeleton seem to have been running into an issue with all of the short edges that a voronoi structure produces. I found a way to get rid of small lines resulting in a cleaner "faux-voronoi" set of lines. The trouble I'm having is that with the way I did it now the exoskeleton plugin treats them all as separate objects (or something). The resulting exoskeleton doesn't produce nodes anymore and just makes each line a separate object. Can someone give me a hint here?

Note, I'm pretty green to Grasshopper so if I'm asking unclearly or awkwardly, please work with me. I've got lots to learn.

I've attached the file I'm working with. I'm using the Exoskeleton Plug-in and a nice simplify points component I found on the forum made by David Reeves.

Attachments:

Voronoi 4.gh, 27 KB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Pieter Segeren on February 21, 2015 at 4:42am

Hi Evan, that's a clear explanation of your issue, and nobody will judge any exersize:)

Since your grafting the exoskeleton Lines input they're treated seperately. Don't graft that. Also there are duplicate lines in there (there might be lines with length 0 in there too), remove these too.
Your setting for the Spacing (Division length along tubes - input "D") is greater than most of the lines length, reduce that to fit at least your shortest line. I think you may want to increase the number of sides for the tubes. (I had to flip the mesh normals in my case). Hope this helps. Have fun!

Permalink Reply by Evan Reese on February 21, 2015 at 6:44am

Thanks Pieter, thats helpful. Daniel's Topologizer did the trick for me very cleanly, but I'd still like to follow up some of your suggestions so that I get better at solving things for myself and not just hoping there's an add-on for everything.

I ran it through Kangaroo's remove duplicate lines and did a dispatch with a smaller than input to eliminate 0 length lines and that also worked for me. Is that how you might do it or have you got a different workflow for that sort of thing? Thanks.

Permalink Reply by Pieter Segeren on February 21, 2015 at 7:13am

Glad to hear that, and indeed I would do it like you discribed.

(only I would use CullPattern (from Sets > Sequence tab) instead of Dispatch, but that's really splitting a hair ~ nevermind that)

Permalink Reply by Evan Reese on February 21, 2015 at 8:03am

Thanks. I will mind that if it's all the same to you. CullPattern is better.

Permalink Reply by David Stasiuk on February 21, 2015 at 4:55am

Daniel Piker's Topologizer component is also a quick and easy way to clean up line networks to remove short elements and combine them into single nodes.

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/profiles/blogs/topologizer-network-cle...

Permalink Reply by Evan Reese on February 21, 2015 at 6:47am

David, this is exactly what I was trying to do and should reduce my number of components by about 80% (since I'm just winging it and slapping stuff together). I'm going to take another shot at it from scratch and make it as clean as I can. Thanks (to you and Daniel).

Permalink Reply by David Stasiuk on February 21, 2015 at 6:55am

Good...yeah it's a really great tool. It isn't very performance-optimized, but it's super useful, and very thorough in the information you can get out of a network.

I wonder...did you also see this thread? http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/skeletal-mesh

The approach there eliminates a lot of issues, and uses the data structure of the voronoi diagram to drive the geometry output. There's some funny outcomes with the edge conditions, but those can be dealt with.

Permalink Reply by Evan Reese on February 21, 2015 at 8:07am

Awesome. I'll have to take some time and dig into this method. The example file looks great so far.

RSS