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 Agnete Juk on May 11, 2013 at 6:40am

Maybe I should be more clear:

The image is a sample of geometry that I already have. I want it to be paneled in some kind of controlled manner - I'm obviously not too good in explaining - I'm attaching an image of nicely paneled piece of a sphere, but the problem that I'm dealing with is that my metaballs are neither spheres, nor uv surfaces, so non of the paneling tools that I'm aware of actually work..

Anyone..?

Attachments:

Capture 2.PNG, 25 KB

Permalink Reply by andreaquartara on May 13, 2013 at 1:49am

Hi Agnete!

How do you have reached the solution of the hexagonal tiling?

Permalink Reply by Agnete Juk on May 13, 2013 at 7:52am

I did not - found the piece of dome in a sketchup 3d warehouse... Although here you can find a relatively nice one: http://www.grasshopper3d.com/profiles/blogs/planar-hexagons-on-doub...

and here: http://www.livearchitecture.net/archives/581

Permalink Reply by andreaquartara on May 13, 2013 at 8:48am

thanks a lot! if you discorver a simple way to have a mesh from metaball's curve update this post!!

I have made this simple solution..

Permalink Reply by Agnete Juk on May 13, 2013 at 8:52am

I create bunch of points on those curves, bake them into rhino & "mesh from points" in rhino .. if that helps...

Permalink Reply by andreaquartara on May 13, 2013 at 9:58am

sorry for the attachend image..this was the image to answer you..

I need to have directly a mesh on grasshopper, to analyse it, and mesh from point isn't a good solution for me

Permalink Reply by Agnete Juk on May 13, 2013 at 10:05am

sorry, I gave it a shot as well, looking for various solutions to create that mesh directly in grasshopper, but with my limited knowledge and patience, since it was not crucial to me, didn't find a way.

If you do though, please share!

cheers

Permalink Reply by Hannes Löschke on June 4, 2013 at 2:46am

All approaches to make a metaball mesh in GH involve the marching cube algorithm in some way. There are script component solution like organic mesh modeling, as well as plugins such as millipede.

All those will give you a mesh that looks like an overlay of 2D Metaball in X, Y and Z.

Depending on what you want to analyze, this might be a good start.

Permalink Reply by David Stasiuk on June 4, 2013 at 4:17am

This way is pretty fun. You basically wrap a geodesic dome around a set of metaball curves and shrink it. You need kangaroo and weaverbird for this definition to work...

Attachments:

metaball.gh, 30 KB

Permalink Reply by Daniel Piker on June 4, 2013 at 7:02am

Here's another way of doing it using the LevelSet force in Kangaroo, which I think is a bit lighter than pulling to curves.

You can start with any mesh which encompasses the charge points, and it pulls the vertices to the isosurface value you choose. The springs and smoothing help keep it from distorting too much.

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