Ruled voronoi panelization on curved shapes

Hello everyone,
First of all, thank you all for this forum, it's helping me so much with grasshopper !

Although the answer to my question is probably on the forum already, I can't find it so here it is:

We have an assignement for school; we have to model a lamp using rhino/grasshopper/python. One part of the lamp will be 3d printed using a white plastic material (opaque ) and the other part will be cnc milled(3axis) on a 3mm thick plexi.
We also already have a led kit mounted on an aluminium plate.
Everything will be mounted together.

The idea here with our grasshopper definition is to be able to explore different shapes here we took an egg as an example but we would like to be able to apply this to any shape really.

Right now we encounter 2 problems we can not solve.
1)Thickening the voronoi skeleton in a way that would give us a clean closed Brep,
As of right now we only uses the extrusion tool in both sides for each surfaces but we end up with a very nasty model with faces traversing eachother ... not suitable for 3dprinting.

2)We would like to figure out a way to develop a ruled voronoi mesh we could mill out of the cnc machine an "drape" around our shape(meaning with don't want to cut each voronoi cell cells but rather "origami" it on the 3d structure) but so far the best idea was to offset the voronoi connect the new voronoi with surfaces and use those surfaces to trim normal planes (could not find a way to trim the boxes ) but we can't figure out how to create surfaces or even solids out of these new planar curves and yet we haven't adress the ruled surface problem.

Alright that's it,
If you have any suggestion for the project please do not hesitate :)
Here's the gh so far, the egg definition is from the forum btw :p

cheers !

Attachments:

poronoi_4.gh, 29 KB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Birk Binnard on December 12, 2016 at 9:43am

Here's a solution for your #1 issue that I came up with - it requires the WeaverBird plug-in that is both mysterious (to me at least) and very powerful.

It took me quite a while to get this method working and it is based on another post I found here a month or so ago. Frankly I do not understand how it works, but it does produce nice results.

The parameters are very sensitive and you have to be careful when you change them. It is easy to cause the cluster to crash - this usually happens in the last WeaverBird step. You also have to make sure your surface is sized properly - I made you egg larger in order to get the cluster to work.

I have used this method for several 3D printed parts; here are 2:

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1959298

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1952492

PS: I don't understand how you made your egg shape - it seems overly complex. I would have done it by making a surface of revolution from a single edge curve. That's how I made the center part of CageLight4.

Attachments:

poronoi_4-bb.gh, 51 KB

Permalink Reply by Thomas Dissaux on December 12, 2016 at 11:28am

Thank you for taking the time,
The definition is pretty clean so already thanks :p
What we're going for is quite similar but more on the sharper side hoping to play with small panels of different opacities and colors later to control through which holes and how the light is going out.

I still have issues finding a solution:
In order to get that sharp look I'm scaling down the shape, deconstruct the meshes and connect them via ruled surfaces but of course I get to many surfaces since i can not control which edges i want to connect :/
Afterwards I have never found the grasshopper component that would do exactly the same as meshtonurbs so I still need to bake and reintroduce the geometry after (not very practical :( )
Then I noticed the shape I'm left with does not give me planar faces so no way to extract and panels :/
Here are some screenshot to better explain the issues.

Thanks again :D

Attachments: