MetaBall question

Can anyone help me with this meatball definition. I somehow get 1637 metaball isocurves an obviously a lot less are visible. If I bake the definition a lot of curves are overlaying each other.

Thanks, Wieland

MetaBallTest.ghx

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on July 22, 2010 at 4:14am

Hi Wieland, How's it going?

The simple answer is you have to remove the duplicate lines, I think Daniel Piker's Kangaroo plug-in has a component for this task so if you have it installed try it. It will do lines and points

Best regards,
Danny

Permalink Reply by Wieland Schmidt on July 22, 2010 at 6:49am

Hi Danny, good to hear from you. I haven't done much with Daniel Piker's Kangaroo jet, maybe I should try it. I thought the problem could be solved in grasshopper...

Greetings from Munich, Wieland

Permalink Reply by Tomasz Gancarczyk on July 22, 2010 at 8:35am

http://ledatomica.wordpress.com/2010/04/11/organic-mesh-modelling-i...

Permalink Reply by taz on July 22, 2010 at 10:55am

Danny is right.

Daniel posted just the remove duplicates from Kangaroo a while back. I think it may still work:

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/management-of-lists?comme...

Permalink Reply by Tomasz Gancarczyk on July 22, 2010 at 12:32pm

Aha! right 'removeDuplicateLines' works fine with this! it's just a supporting component coming with kangaroo so to use it You don't have to know how to manage kangaroo .

Permalink Reply by Wieland Schmidt on July 23, 2010 at 2:12am

Thanks taz and Tomasz for your replays and links. I will use Daniel's Kangaroo. I thought there must be a possibility not creating the duplicate curves in the first place. The MetaBall component is quite slow, what is your experience?

Permalink Reply by to] on July 23, 2010 at 7:11am

Hi Wieland

so metaball isn't a slow solver. david did a really great work @ the development of that marching cube solver.
so i have updated your definition so that it is working without any duplicate curve and really fast
so the magic is to prepare the data structure in that way that it is sorted in z direction in your case
take a look on the attached image or file
greetings from innsbruck to munich ;)

Attachments:

100723_metaball.ghx, 131 KB

Permalink Reply by Wieland Schmidt on July 23, 2010 at 9:11am

Hi to],

vielen Dank nach Innsbruck. That was what I was looking for. Now it is really fast... great job. What is the Path Mapper actually doing?

BTW I am following your work on www.utos.blogspot.com cool stuff you are doing.

Thanks, Wieland

Permalink Reply by to] on July 23, 2010 at 9:23am

the path mapper is used to clean or adapt the pathstructure
in this case i rebuild the structure from path created from lines to a data structure where each intersection plane @ z has is own path
so turning the points from vertical order to horizontal order
i hope this is a almost clear description

thanks for your compliments
what are you doing in munich?

maybe if you want you can join one of our workshops which we plan to host in the future

best
-to]

Permalink Reply by Wieland Schmidt on July 23, 2010 at 9:52am

this is great fun now...

I would like to join one of your workshops, keep me posted...

I am teaching architecture at the TU Munich and I have a small architectural office in Munich.

Permalink Reply by robin on October 13, 2010 at 2:54am

hi weiland / to]

i've been having similar difficulties with the metaBall component [speed of solution etc.] i can see how the ordering of the path structure allows for better solution, but can't overcome this when working with a number of inter - connecting curves [as opposed to 'infinite' lines] [where not every plane intersects with every curve in the definition]. i can generate a solution where there are thousands of duplicates, but nothing as clean as the example above. if there are any suggestions how this might be done, it would be great !!

Permalink Reply by andreas andreas on January 24, 2012 at 7:19am

Hallo,

im working with this component for the first time now and downloaded your definition. How can you generate a clean surface with the output lines? As I see on your post at the bottom of your page, U used the plane component und simply extruded the srf. But it doesn't look clean. Is there another way? Thank you. Gruß, Andreas