Postprocessing relaxed Mesh?

Hi all.

We're in the middle of our bachelor thesis, and decided to be couragious, getting far out of our sketchup-comfort zone and design in Grasshopper.We already did a lot of experiments and thanks to Daniel Pikers' Tutorial mesh relaxation tutorials we are already pretty far.

The Idea of our design is a hanging structure suspendend in a gap between buildings, where you can find places to rest, read or even to sleep. You can find privacy in the cocoons, that are connecting the planes with each other.

As structure we have a net in mind, that is tighter in the area of the cocoons and more transparent in the common areas, but we really don't know whats the right way to get to this point.

In the end of the project we need a printable geometry. We start our boxy design in Sketchup, and remesh it in Rhino. After that we feed it in our kangaroo definition.

1. A nurbs surface could give us more freedom (for postprocessing in tsplines) to form meshes with shorter and longer edges, representing our net. But I see now easy way to get a surface out of the relaxed kangaroo mesh.

2. Working with the kangaroo mesh could also work fine, if we'd find a way to control the edge length of the mesh (for example 20 cm in the common area and 5 in the privates) with an attractor point. Remeshing with Daniel's Plankton Plugin sadly doesn't work, I always get the "runaway faces circulator"-error.

3. It woud be great to convert the mesh to a hexagonal mesh, but I don't know any possibility to remesh an existing one...

You see, we're full of questions, but I really hope to get some help here :)

Agostino & Johanna

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Permalink Reply by Agostino Nickl on May 15, 2014 at 9:04am

Here is a better version of the output mesh, after running the repair tool in rhino and smoothen by weaverbird

Attachments:

mesh_aus_rhino.3dm, 663 KB

Permalink Reply by Daniel Piker on May 15, 2014 at 9:35am

Hi Agostino,

First of all - interesting design!

Running the Rhino commands UnifyNormals and MeshRepair on that mesh suggests something strange is going on with the connectivity. If the mesh is non-manifold and without any consistent face orientation possible, then it won't work with Plankton for things like remeshing, or thickening with cytoskeleton.

Without having looked too closely, my guess would be that the step where you 'remesh it in Rhino' could be where the mesh is going bad. Are you using the ReduceMesh command? I'd avoid doing this wherever possible, as it can result in all sorts of non-manifold weirdness that becomes very hard to fix later.

Permalink Reply by Agostino Nickl on May 15, 2014 at 12:01pm

Hi Daniel,

First of all - thank you for your amazing work in your plugins, even if we are at the very start of exploring the possibilities.

We use the Mesh-Command in Rhino to give kangaroo the needed resolution (for example max edge: 50 cm) - This way we can control the complexity of the mesh. I also tried subdividing the input mesh in Grasshopper with the custom mesh settings component, but the meshes turn out worse or the whole process ends up freezing my computer.

I think the problem derivates from the geometry, there is a spiral-kind of way up in the geometry, maybe this messes with the mesh boundaries?

Permalink Reply by Agostino Nickl on May 15, 2014 at 12:33pm

I tried to split the mesh right below the first twist of the spiral, and it worked - I really think that this is the difficult part for plankton, but it's also something I don't want to change in my Design.

At least the Mesh edges can be thickened with the pipe command, so printing should be possible. The only thing that's bad, that once out of kangaroo, I have no possibility to change the meshes edge length, or to turn it in a different looking mesh (apart from subdividing everything with weaverbird).

I think I could even deal with the mesh edges manually, if there would be an easy way to add more density to the mesh in some parts with an attractor.

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