Offsetting and Scaling Facet Dome Panels

Hey guys,

I would like to generate a second surface shell for a facet dome. I need to offset the surfaces by the same distance but maintain edge geometry.

I've tried offsetting untrimmed surfaces and expanding them to find intersection lines but i feel pretty lost

I've tried a number things but have had no luck, this seems like if would be an obvious issue so I imagine it may have already been tackled. Anyone have any suggestions of point me in a right direction?

Thanks for any help, really appreciate it.

Kristian

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Jesus Galvez on May 5, 2013 at 5:25pm

If think what you are looking to do is precisely the virtue of conical meshes. If you are serious about the subject maybe you should take a look into them. Here is a nice powerpoint presentation:

www.cise.ufl.edu/research/SurfLab/seminar/PQmesh.ppt

Permalink Reply by Daniel Piker on May 6, 2013 at 4:16am

You can always make a parallel planar offset, but for quad meshes, this will generally not 'node out' cleanly, and your offset mesh will have some multiple vertices where your original had only 1. Jesus is right that in this case having a conical mesh is a way of guaranteeing a parallel face offset mesh that nodes out.

However, it looks like in your case the starting polysurface has only 3-valent vertices, which means you don't have this problem, as the 3 faces around each vertex will always intersect in a common point. I think you are on the right track to generate the offset faces and then find the offset vertices by intersecting them.
A similar topic was just being discussed in the weaverbird forum recently, and I wrote a response there with some ideas for how to tackle it, but it got deleted for some reason (maybe because I mentioned using starling!).