voronoi_drilling

This is a technique I've been using to make cnc toolpaths. It's a very simple concept:

if you take a ball end mill and drill into a piece of material at a constant depth it recreates the exact same logic produced by running the 2-d voronoi component.

From a given set of polylines we can extract the centers and this can drive both the voronoi component as well as provide the XYZ drill points for the cnc. The definition has a variety of different options. You need Lunchbox, Weaverbird, and Starling. I can't tell you how amazing these 3 tools are from a design perspective. They are extremely powerful so if you don't have these you must install them asap. You can get the tools at http://www.food4rhino.com/

This definition works by first choosing a grid type, next you choose voronoi type, and subdivision type. From the voronoi type list you can choose basic (just grid), truncation (uses truncation calculated via the image sampler), truncation dual (uses the dual of the truncated image based grid), and subdivision (takes the basic grid type and uses different subdivision shcemes). Each of these provide different patterns of polylines from which we can extract our drilling points. I am rather proud of this definition since the overall idea is one which is so simple it's easy to overlook - the idea that drilling with a ball end mill makes voronoi plots. Now when you combine that with all of these amazing tools it can go off right quick. The nice thing is the paatern you see on screen is the pattern that gets made by drilling wysiwyg cnc patterns.