How to panel a non-UV surface?

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Permalink Reply by John Stack Ross on October 13, 2014 at 3:22pm

Sassom,

If you don't have a surface domain to work with, you can try creating a paneling grid through curve intersections. Or, use Weaverbird to easily locate mesh vertices as a grid. Paneling tools will want quads though (as far as I know). You could sort the mesh vertices into rows and columns.

John

Attachments:

• Untitled-1.jpg, 846 KB

Permalink Reply by sas som on October 15, 2014 at 1:31pm

Dear John, 

Thank you for the answer. Weaverbird seems to be great to subdivide a rough flattened topology to a certain number of triangles, but how do I wrap this tessellated topology to a certain surface?

Permalink Reply by Rajaa Issa on October 14, 2014 at 9:33am

Sas som,

As John mentioned, PanelingTools will need some base geometry, surface or curves, to build the quadratic grid. You can design your grid to subdivide to triangles, but the base is quadratic. If you post your geometry, maybe we will be able to better help.

Permalink Reply by sas som on October 15, 2014 at 1:40pm

Dear Rajaa,

Thank you for the answer.

For example I have this kind of geometry, and I'd like to panel it with triangles, and I'd like to make it parametrically to be able to control the number of the triangles. The quadratic grid does not seem to have a nice result. If I start with triangular topologies, and subdivide them, they will have a nicer, and more logical result (attached picture).

Any ideas how to tessellate a surface like this?

Any suggestions are appreciated!

Attachments:

• geometry.3dm, 120 KB

Permalink Reply by Matthew Gardner on May 25, 2015 at 6:42am

Did you ever get an answer? I have a similar question, that relates to the paneling of a complex mesh, and id like to control the size of the panels (be they triangles)

Permalink Reply by Rajaa Issa on May 25, 2015 at 8:08am

Hi Mathew,
Yours is a different kind of problem. The process of paneling your mesh with a controlled size panels might require a bit of creativity. One way is to close your holes, then project an array of curves in the direction of your desired paneling, then use these curves as base to create the grid using ptGridUcurves.

Permalink Reply by John Stack Ross on May 25, 2015 at 10:51am

Matthew, not sure what result you are looking for, but you can extract the mesh vertices and then sort them into a PT grid. I've used Weaverbird's Vertices Component and then a PT Compose Grid Number component. Be sure to set the row number (N) to match your mesh (see image attached).

Permalink Reply by Rajaa Issa on May 25, 2015 at 8:06am

Hi Sas,
This is more of a subdivision approach to paneling. PT support a very basic function, ptPanelSubdivide where you feed a surface and initial poly lines. If you are willing to reconsider your module as a combination of 2 triangles, then the topology become rectangular based and you can use PT for it.