Panelling metaballs

Hi all,

I am looking for a way to panel a few metaballs. As I'm looking for a best solution for this kind of surface, I'm not too picky when it comes to the shape of the panels as long as they are not triangles and planar. By the way, I'm fairly new to grasshopper and kangaroo.

Any ideas?

thanks in advance,

Attachments:

metaballs.PNG, 247 KB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by andreaquartara on June 4, 2013 at 8:16am

Hi david! I've tried to open your definition but I have some problem:

- I don't know the sphere fitting comand but probably it doesn't work to me (has it to do like a bounding box?)

- after the construct mesh wbEdges say to me that the topology is invalid

- in the group "reconstruct the geodesic wrapped around metaballs" I have this condition: is it correct?

Ps: I'm using Rhino 5 SR0 and GH 0.9.0014

thanks

Permalink Reply by David Stasiuk on June 4, 2013 at 9:22am

Regarding the sphere fit, it may be because of the GH version...i'm using 0.9.0056. But you should be able to set your initial radius/sphere orientation any number of ways, and based on your layout, I'd probably do it more by hand...basically you want the center of your base geodesic sphere (the one after the first loop subdivision) to just wrap around all of your metaball curves.

That said, I think you might have some issues due to how you have that one metaball that mostly disconnected from the rest...the issue is that the definition as I have it set up takes each vertex from the geodesic sphere and runs it to the center, then tests all of the points from the metaball curve divisions, and identifies the three closest...it averages these points and sets that to the new vertex location. This works well enough when each line "crosses" the metaball threshold in one location...but if it passes through the metaball multiple times, then it could mess up the mesh topology. I'd focus on how the mesh looks before it gets fed into kangaroo at all. If it's folded over itself, then either the geodesic sphere location or the metaball configuration aren't playing nice with the setup as it is. I'm sure there's a better way to do it (you may want to explore Daniel's approach that he posted above, as it cuts out a lot of this stuff, although I don't think you can adjust the metaball charges individually)...I'll have a think about it...