Spheres and Metaballs

Hi Guys,

I would like to merge two spheres together in the same way "metaballs" would do.

Is there a simple way to do that?

Many thanks,

Arthur

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on March 5, 2010 at 2:13pm

Hi Arthur,

not like meta-balls no. However you can probably get quite a nice result by creating a Revolve surface. You'd have to create the revolution curve, but you can do that with Arcs, Fillets, Bi-Arcs, Bezier splines or whatever else makes sense.

This of course only works when you have 2 spheres, once you have more than two, Revolve is no longer your friend.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Arthur Mamou-Mani on March 5, 2010 at 2:42pm

Thanks David,
I saw your videos on metaballs which got me very inspired.
Could i ask you how you managed to do that ?

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on March 5, 2010 at 2:57pm

My metaballs so far are merely a lot of stacked curve sections. I believe Daniel Piker did make some meta-ball surface/mesh algorithms, but you'll have to get those from him.

It's actually not possible to make meta-balls with single nurbs surfaces. Well, it is possible in certain simple cases.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Karol Wawrzyniak on June 14, 2016 at 3:33am

Hi guys,

i will refresh this topic because i have exactly same question but 6 years later- so probably somebody will find this post in the future as well :)

The diference is i would like to merge multipule spheres.

Is there a solution for this already?

should i look more into minimal suface? or this is a wrong direction.

best

Attachments:

forum_mono.3dm, 1.1 MB

Permalink Reply by Nik Willmore on June 14, 2016 at 6:48pm

The Cocoon plugin will do metasurfaces from arbitrary NURBS surfaces including your eggs. That will give an outer surface result and multiple or a single inner surface(s) you can delete. That's because it thickens the surface into a shell, and multiple shells will blend together nicely. If engineering accuracy is needed, offset inwards your source objects and tweak the power/radius settings to restore the original bigger size.

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