Finding the middle-line of an elongated point-cloud

Hi all,

I wan't to post-process a mesh a Rhino and would like to define its middle curve (central axis). I exploded the mesh into its points (see image), but I'm somehow stuck conceptually on how to proceed. I'd like the solution to be generic, so to work with any similarly elongated mesh, but with different shapes.

Any insight?

cheers

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on May 9, 2011 at 9:57am

It needs a bit of refining but as a first go this works quite well.

It uses two non-standard GH components from Giulio's Weaverbird and Shortest Walk.

It extracts the edges of a mesh to get the shortest path between 2 user defined points. From this you get cross sections of the mesh and can therefore work out the centroid for the neutral axis.

Attachments:

MeshNeutralAxis.3dm, 154 KB
MeshNeutralAxis.ghx, 96 KB

Permalink Reply by Sebastien Turcaud on May 10, 2011 at 6:08am

Hi Danny,

thks alot for your input. I only reply now, cause I had to wait for "admin" to install weaverbird (I didn't read the smallscript saying you could also without^^).

It works quite well. However I have a problem, when my mesh is bended more than 180°, cause the perpendicular frames cross the mesh two times.

See what I mean?