Celtic Bunny

Upon subdividing a directly produced quad mesh ( http://www.grasshopper3d.com/photo/mesh-to-nurbs-polysurface-conver... ) from a uniform Kangaroo 1 MeshMachine remesh, I noticed that little weave-ready ribbons appeared:

Though the Mesh+ plug-in has a few "weave" components, they only make local loops between adjacent mesh faces.

So I did the bookeeping required to create little construction ellipses and little stubby start and end lines offset in and out from each mesh edge to allow a curve blend and then rail sweep of locally rescaled ellipses along those curves, with lots of control.

There are occasional tube self overlaps due to kinks that would require fixing in other software to 3D print the output.

Interestingly, the result is sometimes a single knot curve, more often a mere handful.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Tim on April 14, 2016 at 10:57pm

I don't usually work in such artistic way but damn, every time I see something crazy I wanna try too. Thanks for sharing, I'll try to understand the logic, workflow and approach to something like this.

Permalink Reply by Nik Willmore on April 15, 2016 at 12:53am

MeshMachine will also accept NURBS input, by the way.

It took two days of time away from it to gather the energy and clarity to trial and error successfully through the jungle of data trees.

Permalink Reply by Tim on April 15, 2016 at 1:00am

I've done something like that before, not as extensive but at least I don't need to recreate the definition from an image XD. I'm very diligent when it comes to understanding the logic of something that does cool looking stuff. Such a pity I can't dive right in but have to work on my graduation design. Never the less, I saved the page for later. Thanks for your hard work and will to share and let others learn, really appreciate it.

Permalink Reply by Nik Willmore on April 15, 2016 at 9:12am

The "Construction Ellipses" uses a negative number node to create both outer and inner construction points but then I had to use a data duplicate node to get a matching set of starting edge points for the entire set.

The weaving and unweaving in "Construction Curves Rotation" is to avoid duplicating lots of nodes for the two sets, inner and outer. But I need them back as separate sets to manually connect them in the right order.

"Get Faces..." was a kludge to get the points in consistent order since a simple list failed to give consistency.

"Construction Planes..." was much trial and error with single list item screen previews to finally flip a plane around in a way that captured all the local edge info.

Having to flip the inner set of little construction line curves in "Tubes" was also trial and error based on using a slider to see only one face set at a time. There's a plug-in I believe that let me select a single tree branch to treat a tree as a list, since that is bizarrely lacking in native Grasshopper.

Permalink Reply by Nik Willmore on April 15, 2016 at 9:00am

The loop system has the same number of ribbons per face but requires a bit different construction curve strategy at the edges since rather than edge pairs being above and below each other, they are in the same plane of the face, merely angling to create a transition between outer and inner weaves.

Permalink Reply by Nik Willmore on April 15, 2016 at 12:01pm

To create a single surface mesh for 3D printing, expensive ($8.5K) Geomagic Freeform works but is slow. ZBrush's Unified Surface then its Decimation Master included plugin works fine through at minimum (1) smoothing level for the skin.

Permalink Reply by Tim on April 15, 2016 at 10:31pm

This will totally give me a brain cancer XD. I think I'll start from auto NURBS surfacing of meshes and try to understand that first, then come back here with something simple like a sphere.

What you are saying is that after Zbrush this model is printable? Nice!

Permalink Reply by Nik Willmore on April 16, 2016 at 7:12am

Loops version required some rewiring so this is a complementary script, not a replacement.

Attachments:

Mesh Tri Weave Loops A.gh, 135 KB

Permalink Reply by Kim hauer on April 16, 2016 at 10:47am

I wanted to give this a spin, but I'm missing a plugin!... I can't find a D/L of treesloth01

Permalink Reply by Nik Willmore on April 16, 2016 at 12:58pm

Unweave isn't native Grasshopper? Why don't these guys list which plugin each component is from on the pop-up info and the help text? I'm not sure where I got this, since a search of Tree Sloth leads to Milk Box, so here's my version, attached.

It also requires TTToolbox to do my preview menu since given the lack of a street smart data tree manual I've never figured out how to select a single tree branch using an index number without its Tree Branch Index component.

For beginners: use the File>Special Folders> Components Folder menu to open the directory to put plugins into then issue GrasshopperUnloadPlugin in Rhino to be able to restart Grasshopper.

TTToolbox is here:

http://www.food4rhino.com/project/tttoolbox

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