pull to surface, general questions

hey...so i'm working with weaverbird and kangaroo, trying to constrain a mesh's points to a brep, and using forces to optimize/equalize their position...and eventually tweak the subdivision based on attributes of the brep/mesh; functions of curvature, deviation, etc.

i started just by trying to constrain the points and have them equalize, treating each mesh wire as identical springs (like daniels gif of equalizing on a stretched sphere). but immediately i have crashes, "out of index" errors, or (best case) nothing happens.

i kinda feel like i'm missing something... grasshopper definition attached to show my sorry state.

is there anyone out there going great guns with kangaroo? understanding every functionality and simulating your dreams?

i think a sort of a description of the way K passes data between its components, the classes of kangaroo objects, what data must match to what, etc would help a lot of people. for me, it's easier to understand a new software if i understand this type of stuff - the structure of it, basically...

anyway, thanks! i'm having fun experimenting... the potential is great

Attachments:

kangaroo_constrain_mesh.gh, 72 KB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Daniel Piker on January 23, 2011 at 7:50am

Hi Gabriel,

Thanks for posting your questions, I'll do my best to answer them

To help me see more clearly what you are trying to achieve could you post the rhino file referenced by this gh definition ?

Permalink Reply by gabriel on January 23, 2011 at 1:39pm

here's my file. thanks for taking a look at it!

Attachments:

meshbrep.3dm, 483 KB

Permalink Reply by Daniel Piker on January 23, 2011 at 6:51pm

There were a few things off with the settings, but the main problem here was that you need to start with something like a reasonable mesh before you start trying to equalize it. It looked like you were using just the rhino Mesh from NURBS object, which ends up with a very messy random mix of edges per vertex - so it can't be turned into a 'nice' mesh by just relaxing the edge lengths.

You might be better off making a mesh yourself, by joining primitives, because then you start with a reasonable topology and Kangaroo can take care of making the geometry the same as your target surface.

I am working on some tools that could change the mesh topology too, as well as relaxing their geometry, but they are not ready just yet.

Attachments: